Finding Your Roots by Gates Jr. Henry Louis & David Altshuler

Author:Gates Jr., Henry Louis & David Altshuler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2014-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Samuel L. Jackson (b. 1948)

As an actor, his intensity is almost unrivaled. Samuel L. Jackson is that rare Hollywood star who garners both big results at the box office and plaudits from critics. Starting out on stage and then in television, he has since had an enviable, eclectic career in film. Although the role that most people point to as the one that changed his career is that of the extemporizing hit man Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, Sam considers his roles as the crack addict Gator in Jungle Fever and Zeus Carver in Die Hard with a Vengeance to be the pivotal ones. Add to it roles in such blockbusters as Star Wars and The Avengers and the critically important slave revenge fantasy, Django Unchained. For those coming up behind him in Hollywood, Jackson’s career has opened doors previously closed.

In 2011 Sam took on an another immense challenge: starring in his first Broadway show, The Mountaintop, and portraying none other than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I would find it intimidating to play such a larger-than-life figure. Sam agreed that evoking the public King would have been daunting, but the private King was a different story. “We come into a motel room, we close the door, he slumps his shoulders, he takes his coat off,” Sam said, describing the man behind the mystique. “Whole other cat.”

Sam’s connection to Martin Luther King is more than artistic. In 1968, as a freshman at King’s alma mater, Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Sam was given the honor of serving as an usher at Dr. King’s funeral. Radicalized by the assassination, Sam joined the Black Power movement. “I wasn’t a real advocate of this nonviolence and that whole thing,” Sam said. “I was hanging around the SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—office a lot. I spent more time with guys like Stokely [Carmichael] and [H.] Rap [Brown], and at the time my favorite slogan about the revolution was ‘At a certain point caution becomes cowardice.’” Sam and other students led protests against the school itself, opposing the fact that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was a student there, there was no black studies program, no black representation on the board of trustees, and no involvement from the black community, either off campus or on. “It was all manner of things that the students had no voice in,” he said. “It was run like a plantation.” He still carries some of that righteous anger into his most electrifying screen work.

As a teenager, Sam never thought about being an actor, although he’d been on stage for as long as he could remember. His aunt Edna was a performing arts teacher, and Sam was included in every show she did. But to consider performing as a profession? No, that didn’t cross his mind. “I had no idea how Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte got to where they were. That wasn’t an option,” he laughed. “But the one thing I had decided by this age was that I was not going to spend my life in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

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