Film Screening: The Spook Who Sat By the Door

Fit, Black, and Educated San Diego (FBE) and WorldBeat Cultural Center are proud to bring you a great event!
You are invited to a scheduled in-person discussion of the book and film adaptation of the The Spook Who Sat By the Door by Sam Greenlee,
on September 26th at 6:30pm.
This will be followed by a viewing of the classic film version of the book.
This will be a socially distanced event and will have limited seating. All guests must bring and wear a mask. ( Link to event )

by Makeda Cheatom

This is the all-time classic book, that activist book turned into a movie. Spook inspired most of the young activist groups to organize and centralize against the racial injustices to Black people. As Greenlee said the best weapon we can have is “Black unity”.

Over the course of his career, Sam Greenlee has been a novelist, poet, screenwriter, journalist, teacher, and talk show host. Born in Chicago on July 13, 1930, by age fifteen, Greenlee participated in his first sit-in and walked in his first picket line. His social activism continued throughout his life.

Greenlee's first and most well known novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, was published in 1968. This prize-winning novel quickly became an underground favorite for its fictionalization of an urban-based war for African American liberation. Greenlee co-wrote a screenplay adaptation of the novel, and in 1973 The Spook Who Sat by the Door was released on film. 

When it was published 45 years ago, Sam Greenlee's novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door got a lot of media play. The book centered on a conspiracy theory — a popular trope of fiction at the time — not so surprising, as government-sanctioned spies had been surveying black activists for years, thanks to J Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program. But in this book, the conspirators were black and bent on correcting a system they saw as racist and corrupt.

In writing Spook, Greenlee drew on his own background. He had a career in the US Foreign Service and was posted to trouble spots like Pakistan, Greece, and Iraq from the 1950s through the mid-'60s.

When Spook became an independent film in 1973, Greenlee had to make it next door in Indiana — the themes of racial strife he planned to film did not please then-mayor Richard Daley.

We don't know what Greenlee's experience was, but we can guess: his protagonist, agent Dan Freeman, takes all the insults and injuries that usually accompany integrating an organization with no interest in being integrated. He consistently outperformed his white peers, and after five years, he quit. Then he took his Agency expertise underground to form a private black militia. Many of his troops were made of society's irreclaimable — gang members, criminals and high school troublemakers whose street smarts would be useful in the war he was planning to wage. The film was an overnight success when it was released and was then unexpectedly taken out of distribution.

Fit, Black, and Educated San Diego (FBE) and WorldBeat Cultural Center are proud to bring you a great event! You are invited to a scheduled in-person discussion of the book and film adaptation of the The Spook Who Sat By the Door by Sam Greenlee, on September 26th at 6:30pm. This will be followed by a viewing of the classic film version of the book. This will be a socially distanced event and will have limited seating. All guests must bring and wear a mask.