Socially-conscious director Spike Lee was born Shelton Lee in Atlanta, Georgia on this day in 1957. As a child, Lee moved with his family to Brooklyn, where he formed the New York identity that still follows him today. After receiving degrees from Atlanta’s Morehouse College and NYU’s film school, the aspiring director began a hot streak of successful movies beginning with 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It. The movie won recognition at Cannes and the Independent Spirit Awards. Lee followed two years later with School Daze, a comedy of class and race where “gammas” face off against the darker-skinned “jigaboos.†Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever and Malcolm X weren’t far behind–all released within six years of the director’s first commercial success. Lee’s blunt portrayal of race relations in America brought popularity, controversy and awards to his doorstep. From his Academy Award-nominated documentary, 4 Little Girls, to his most recent feature, Inside Man, with Denzel Washington and Clive Owen, Lee has managed to remain within the Hollywood system while all at once bucking it.
Quotable: “Wake up. The black man has been asleep for 400 years.”—from his Student Academy Award-winning NYU thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barber Shop: We Cut Heads.
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