Sam Greenlee is relaxed. He sits lotus style on a rainbow-striped blanket, rolling cigarettes and talking in reflective, short streams about the rage that fueled his 1969 underground classic The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
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Growing up in the 30s and 40s in west Woodlawn, Greenlee lived an “idyllic” childhood filled with Sunday school, Boy Scouts, and the rural, southern values of his parents. He went to Englewood High and earned a track scholarship to the University of Wisconsin in 1948. He began a graduate degree in international relations at the University of Chicago. “I went to two white, brainwashing institutions. But I’m the black dog that didn’t fall for Pavlov’s scam,” he says with a chuckle.
After eight years, he left the foreign service but stayed on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he began writing his first novel. “I never could write while I was surrounded by those people,” he says of his colleagues. “I was so enraged when I came home every night. I was watching them undermine whole cultures. The U.S. is the biggest threat to world peace there is.”
The Spook Who Sat by the Door, starring actual Chicago street hustlers, was released on Labor Day weekend 1973 by United Artists. The film, with its militant message, unnerved mainstream America along with some members of the civil rights movement who balked at its violence. “It disappeared from the market,” says Greenlee coolly. “In effect it was banned.”
