Lee, Spike (1957–)

Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee in 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia. His mother gave him the nickname of Spike in reference to his tough personality. His mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, a jazz musician, moved the family to Brooklyn, New York, when he was a young child. Lee returned to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College, where he would first begin making films. After graduating from Morehouse, Lee attended a graduate program in filmmaking at the Tisch School of Arts. He made his first film, The Answer, in 1980 as a rewriting of D. W. Griffith's Birth of the Nation, which had been made in 1915. Although controversial and financially unsuccessful, his short film brought him his first award for filmmaking.

Lee's first film that brought him both critical acclaim and financial success was She's Gotta Have It (1986). The film was a comedy about relationships, exploring themes of gender, race, and sex. Lee continued to receive accolades with his next film, School Daze (1988). With this film, Lee established himself as having an important voice on the experience of African Americans in the United States because of the film's themes of conflict, education, and capitalism within a historically black school. Further establishing his credibility and ability to portray the historical and present difficulties in relations between blacks and whites in the United States, Lee made the groundbreaking film Do the Right Thing (1989), set in Brooklyn, New York, on a hot summer day. Lee became an important model and mentor as a strong, passionate, and articulate black man with a unique perspective on racism in the United States.

After the critical success of Do the Right Thing, Lee moved away from controversy with his next film, [Page 840]Mo' Better Blues (1990), about a jazz musician. Lee would resume making films that made powerful commentary on black-white relations in the United States with Jungle Fever (1991), about interracial dating, and with Malcolm X (1992). Although Lee has continued to receive critical success for his ability to make movies that push the outside of the envelope about the experience of African American in the United States, in films such as Bamboozled, made in 2000, he explored the mockery embedded in the way that Hollywood and white America perceive African Americans, as well as how African Americans see themselves. Lee is a film-maker who has become known for many of his trademarks. In his films, he frequently casts the same actors (e.g., Denzel Washington, John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, Roger Guenveur Smith, himself). He also often has characters in his films address the camera directly during monologues, and there is typically a character using the phrase, “Wake up!” as a call to the audience to heighten social consciousness and emotional maturity. A huge New York Knicks fan, Lee includes a reference to the American pastime of basketball in each of his films. Lee continues to be an important presence in both the film industry and the political arena as an important voice on the African American experience in the United States.

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