J'S THEATER: Image Text Ithaca: Photos of Alex Haley's Memorial & Birth HomeThe

Thursday, July 05, 2018

Image Text Ithaca: Photos of Alex Haley's Memorial & Birth HomeThe

As I mentioned in my previous post, on one of my first afternoons in Ithaca, as a group of the faculty walked to Jason Livingston's car, parked on Cascadilla Street, to head out to the rural barn where the creative seminar took place, Jason pointed out to me one of the town's mostly hidden monuments: author and cultural icon and activist's Alex Haley's birth home, which features a memorial stone and garden right outside. I mentioned in the earlier post that Haley, co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots: An American Family Saga (1976), was born in Ithaca during the period when his father, Dr. Simon Haley, a noted professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M, among other historically black institutions, was enrolled in a master's degree program in agriculture at Cornell University, one of the northern universities that admitted black students in small numbers before the wide-scale US college and university integration of the 1950-1975 period.

I visited the site several times and took a number of photos, thus the repetition in some of the shots. As I also mentioned in my earlier post, the tall stone detailing Alex Haley's life was almost completely obscured by plants, as was the little brick patio and bench; had Jason not pointed it out to me, it would have been easy to walk right past it. It wasn't clear to me whether the homeowner or the city was responsible for maintaining the site, but as things stand, neither was doing much at all even to clear away the branches. Had I more time, I would have rung the bell of the homeowner for a chat; perhaps on another visit.