Spike Lee (1EMC) Group ⑫

one man, a million legacies

a biography of the life of the one and only, Spike Lee

Lee once said "Power is knowing your past", so lets learn about his to find out how did he become a genius.
Born in a racist environment in Brooklyn, he overcame obstacles until he reached Upper East Side of Manhattan. He became an idol, always talking about racism and raising people's awareness of the topic. He is famous for treating black society in his productions.

Shelton Jackson Lee (Spike Lee) was born on March 20, 1957. He lived with his parents, three brothers and a sister in Brooklyn, New York, In Cobble hill, a most italian neighbourhood, there would be one of the first time he would witness racism. Spike was introduced to his African American Identity at an early age because his mom encouraged her children to know African American literature and art. She was a teacher at a private school, while his dad was a jazz musician, who sometimes couldn't even bring money to his family.

Old enough to attend school, Shelton decided to own up the nickname his mother gave him when he was a child, Spike.
He was granted the choice to choose if he would like to go to a private school, but he refused, because he wanted to assure his colleagues were black.
Lee attended an all-black college where his father and grandfather had graduated (Morehouse College), and there he majored in mass communication and completed his first student film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn.

In 1977, his mother died unexpectedly. Therefore, his friends tried to cheer him up with frequent trips to the movies. He, then, discovered his passion in production and direction by becoming a fan of famous directors and movies. He decided he wanted to make films that would capture the black experience. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Film Production and started working for a movie distribution house cleaning and shipping film because he was short on money.

In 1992, Lee met his wife, Tonya Lewis, at a Congressional Black Caucus dinner, a congress to put forth policy and legislation that ensured equal rights, opportunity, and access to Black Americans and other marginalized communities. They, then, got married in mid-1993. Now, they’re living in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, even though Lee has an office in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. They have two children: Satchel and Jackson Lee.

Ever since his first short film, Last Hustle of Brooklyn, he approaches and criticizes race relations, political issues and urban crime and violence.
Lee is also a teacher at the New York University, and has taught at Harvard. He helps students improve their thesis projects.

Spike Lee made and directed over 55 movies, most of them approaching controversial political topics like racism. He has won more than 22 awards from his movies, including:2 Academy awards, 2 Black movie Awards, Humanitarian awards, among others.
Lee submitted his film “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop:We Cut Heads” as his master’s degree thesis in 1983. After being showcased at ‘New Directors New Films Festival’, it won a ‘Student Academy Award’.
He also won the ‘Time Warner Innovator Award’ at the American Black Film Festival’ in 2004 and his movie ‘BlacKkKlansman’ won him ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ at the Academy Awards and at BAFTA film Awards Spike Lee is alive, married with a son and a daughter, and he is still working to this day.

Spike Lee is a very awarded and important director. Most of the times, he relates his films with any kind of prejudice in a very smart way, being current prejudice or old prejudice, to shock people who are watching, so them can despise even more racism. Having this in mind we can say that the world would be different without the influence he made, since he is collaborating with society, by reducing racism, since he express himself very well on his movies and on his fights for human rights and has notoriety among the people.

We can learn from Spike’s life that he has experienced racism in a lot of ways, which made him know this so well that he could show it precisely to people in movies. The racism that he suffered, is very connected with his childhood (since he grew up on an Italian neighborhood, Brooklyn, which made the whites treat him worse, just for him having a different color of body than them and being poor). He has had other bad experiences but were not as frequent as the racism that he suffered when he was young.