While “12 Years a Slave” rakes in raves and Oscar buzz, Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. was the man who made sure the movie was historically accurate.
“I was a consultant adjudicating questions of historical accuracy,” Gates explains of the film by Steve McQueen. “We worked together by phone with different questions.”
But he said there “weren’t many issues” since Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir was used as the basis for the screenplay.
Gates, who hosts PBS genealogy show “Finding Your Roots,” is also debuting six-part “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” on PBS Tuesday night, which spans 500 years of African-American history.
Of his “Roots” series, which has featured guests from Martha Stewart to Cory Booker getting DNA tests to explore their genetic backgrounds, Gates said: “We are all fundamentally related at the most basic level, the level of the genome.”
Plus, historically, “When the lights came down, everybody was sleeping with everybody.”