Simon Alexander Haley, my maternal grandfather, has had a big impact on my life, although I was too young to remember him. His commitment to education impacted the lives of his descendants like me and his former students who attended various colleges.
My late mother, Lois Ann Haley Butts, (formerly Lois Ann Haley Blackstone), proudly displayed Grandpa Simon’s U.S. Army photo from World War I in the living room along with other family members. Mom told me that he had been gassed in France, and that he had been a professor, but more about Grandpa Simon’s life remained unknown to me until I watched the movie, “Queen,” many years later. At that time, I was given a crash course about the trials and triumphs of my ancestors. Queen Jackson Haley, Simon’s mother, was among several ancestral faces that sat atop a glass side table in my youth.
Grandpa was born in 1892 and reared in Savannah, Tennessee. He was the eighth child of Alexander (Alec) Baugh Haley (a part-time sharecropper and local ferry operator) and Queen, his second wife. His formerly enslaved parents were products of a plantation overseer, and a confederate colonel who was the son of a plantation owner.
According to typed family notes, my Uncle Alex Haley interviewed his father in 1962 at one of his brother’s homes. Uncle Alex, who was also one of Grandpa Simon’s sons, documented that Alec was raised as a child of the plantation and “houseboy” after his enslaved, mixed-race Cherokee Indian mother, Sabrina, was sold to Mississippi for resisting the overseer’s further advances. After the Civil War, he did farmwork and drove cattle to the railroad. He later became a ferryman and worked his way up to owning land and houses. Queen was born to an enslaved mother, Easter– the daughter of a Cherokee Indian man and an enslaved woman. Queen did housework and “tended to” her younger half-sister, Eleanora, Col. Jackson’s daughter he fathered with his wife. After the Civil War, Queen worked as a housegirl and cook in Savannah, Tennessee.
Around 1875, Queen and Alec, who were both employees of the Cherry family, met. Alec’s first wife died and Alec later married Queen. My grandfather began working on a 150-acre farm with his brothers, Conway and Abner when he was eight years old.
According to “The Man On The Train,” a short story penned by Alex Haley—originally published in the February 1991 issue of Reader’s Digest— during my grandfather’s era, a boy was considered “wasted” if he remained in school although physically capable of doing farm work.
When young Simon reached the sixth grade, Queen began to reason that since she and Alec had eight children, it would “be prestigious” if “they deliberately wasted one and got him educated.” Queen advocated for Grandpa Simon to surpass his eighth-grade studies, although he had still been required to work in the fields after school.
“I good-talked my father. I told him about all the crops I’d worked. The hogs I’d fed. I said, ‘Papa, I want to go off to school,’” Grandpa also told Uncle Alex when he interviewed him.
Details recounted in “The Man On The Train” also noted that my great-grandfather, Alec, gave my grandfather fifty dollars. He also informed him that he should never ask for more money but permitted him to attend high school. Grandpa enrolled in Lane College’s preparatory department. Back then, the Black Methodist school offered courses through junior college.
After Grandpa Simon depleted his funds, he struggled to pay for his education and only had one pair of pants and shoes. Grandpa worked odd jobs as a waiter, a handyman, a helper at a school for wayward boys, and he made fires in the home of prosperous white families during early mornings.
“The constant struggle to earn money took its toll. Dad’s grades began to founder. But he pushed onward and completed senior high. Next, he enrolled in A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, a land-grant school where he struggled through freshman and sophomore years,” Uncle Alex explained in his published short story.
Grandpa was called into a teacher’s office and informed that he had failed a course. It had required a textbook that he could not afford to purchase at the time. He pondered returning home to sharecrop. Grandpa Simon changed his mind after he received a letter from the Pullman Company. It informed that “he was one of 24 black college men selected from hundreds of applicants to be summertime sleeping-car porters,” according to “The Man on the Train.”
My grandfather was assigned to a Buffalo-to-Pittsburgh train. While working there, he gave a man and his wife glasses of warm milk when they had trouble sleeping. The mysterious man tipped him well. The man turned out to be R. S. M. Boyce, a retired executive of the Curtis Publishing Company. When Grandpa Simon later returned to Greensboro, North Carolina, A & T’s college president informed him that Boyce had donated $500 for his board, tuition and books for the entire school year.
“The surprise grant not only enabled dad to finish A & T, but to graduate first in his class. And the achievement earned him a full scholarship to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York,” said Uncle Alex.
Grandpa Simon later pursued his master’s degree at Cornell University, became a professor, and achieved the milestone of becoming a dean of agriculture.
My mother, Lois Ann, occasionally mentioned to me that Boyce’s generosity not only impacted her father but also his children. Both of her parents—Simon and Zeona Eubanks Hatcher Haley (stepmother of my mother’s brothers), were professors. She became a teacher. Her brother, George Haley, became a lawyer, politician, chairman of the U.S. Postal Rate Commission and ambassador. Julius Haley became an architect, and Uncle Alex became the first Chief Journalist of the U.S. Coast Guard and a writer who became known for penning “Roots,” The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “Queen” and various works.
Some people question the relevance of Black History in today’s time. However, the 2025 Black History Month theme, “African Americans and Labor,” intersects with the history of Pullman porters, their labor, and a pivotal time in American History. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was a union led by A. Phillip Randolph. Grandpa Simon’s gift from Boyce probably would never have happened if he had not been working on a train as a pullman porter trying to pay for school. I do not know who plucked my grandfather’s Pullman Company application from a pile of applications, but I remain forever grateful. The ripple effect of Boyce’s generosity continues in my family to this day. I hope to make my great-grandparents’ sacrifice of allowing Grandpa Simon to be “wasted” worth the sacrifice into the next generation.
Awesome family history! I would love to learn more!!