Everybody knows that acclaimed filmmaker Spike Lee is a product of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, the largest all-male African-American university in the nation. But who is the man and why is he of such importance to Atlanta and the film community?
Who Is Spike Lee?
Spike Lee is a legendary filmmaker, producer and screenwriter who has used his camera lens to highlight institutional racism, expose hypocrisy and celebrate the African-American experience.
Lee has also paved the way for other filmmakers of color to make films in America.
Where Was Spike Lee Born And Raised?
Lee has proudly said that he was born “Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20th in Grady Hospital” in 1957.
His father, Bill Lee, was an accomplished jazz musician who moved the family to New York shortly after Lee’s birth.
While he proudly reps Brooklyn’s Bed-Sty neighborhood, where he’s lived for most of his life, Lee was born in 1957 in the ATL. He told the New York Times, his family moved to Brooklyn, New York when he was a child (Lee was the oldest sibling of six). His family integrated an Italian-American enclave called Cobble Hill. “We got called nigger this and nigger that,” he told the Times.
At Morehouse, Lee was drawn to the big screen, taking film classes at Clark Atlant University. There he made his first film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn.
Once he graduated, he enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, earning a masters in film and TV. Lee quickly rose to fame with the 1985 release of “She’s Gotta Have it,” and then “Do the Right Thing” in 1989.
Lee has been known to create beautiful mosaics of Americana, but if you look closely you can see Atlanta in his filmmaking.
Lee’s ode to collegiate life, “School Daze,” was largely based on his time at Morehouse fraternizing with students at Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown College.
In “Clockers,” Lee gave longtime Atlanta stage actor Tom Byrd, his shot at the big screen. Byrd played a crackhead, but came to personify the drug scourge that had plagued the black community.
Even in Lee’s diversification of women characters in his first film, “She’s Gotta Have It,” the knowing viewer can pick up hints of the AU experience, especially in the full-colored lives of characters such as Clorinda Bradford, Opal Gilstrap, and lead character Nola Darling.
Lee does not like “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” calling it *bs.”