Fires In The Mirror

On November 20, 1991, Smith interviewed Jeffries in a conference room at CUNY. Jeffries has a bodyguard. Jeffries says that people will be surprised to learn that he personally knew Alex Haley and was a major consultant on Roots. At one point, Haley lost the manuscript in the Philadelphia airport and Jeffries had to go find it.

When they were working on the television series, Haley invited Jeffries to go down to Georgia to meet the director and potentially oversee the production. Jeffries tried to change the scripts to “keep Roots honest” (42), but eventually the production people got sick of him and told him they did not have to portray black history truthfully. Jeffries found this moment to be very traumatic. Earlier, Haley’s girlfriend/secretary had called Jeffries to explain that Haley had sold the rights to Roots for a mere 50 grand when it made much more than that, and so Haley sued them. Jeffries argues that the money made by the television series produced more media on Jewish history than onblack history. Jeffries was so upset by the producers telling him, “‘we bought your research / we bought your history’” (43), that he left for a few days.