LLC

The LIFE

 In 1958 Samuel Greenlee, Jr. (SGJ) was awarded Meritorious Service Medal for bravery during the Baghdad revolution), Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece between 1957 and 1965.[6] Leaving the United States foreign service after eight years, he stayed on in Greece. He undertook further study (1963-4) at the Iraq, serving in United States Information Agency fraternity (Beta Omicron 1950). He served in the US Army (1952-4), earning the rank of first lieutenant, and subsequently worked for the Kappa Alpha Psi (1954-7). He was a member of University of Chicago (BS, political science, 1952) and the University of Wisconsin, as well as the University of Thessaloniki, and lived for three years on the island of Mykonos, where he began to write his first novel. That was eventually published in 1969 as The Spook Who Sat by the Door, the story of a black man who is recruited as a CIA agent and having mastered the skills of a spy then uses them to lead a black guerrilla movement in the US.[7][8]

Greenlee co-wrote (with Mel Clay) the screenplay for the 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which he also co-produced with director Ivan Dixon and which is considered "one of the more memorable and impassioned films that came out around the beginning of the notoriously polarizing blaxploitation era."[9] In 2011, an independent documentary entitled Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of the Spook Who Sat by the Door was filmed by Christine Acham and Clifford Ward, about the making and reception of the Spook film,[10] in which Greenlee spoke out about the suppression of the film soon after its release.[11][12] In a chance meeting with Aubrey Lewis (1935–2001), one of the first Black FBI agents to have been recruited in 1962 by the FBI,[13] Greenlee was told that The Spook Who Sat by the Door was required reading at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.[14]

Other works by Greenlee include Baghdad Blues, a 1976 novel based on his experiences traveling in Iraq in the 1950s and witnessing the 1958 Iraqi revolution,[15] Blues for an African Princess, a 1971 collection of poems, and Ammunition (poetry, 1975). In 1990 Greenlee won the Illinois poet laureate award.[16] He also wrote short stories, plays (although he found no producer for any of them),[7] and the screenplay for a film short called Lisa Trotter (2010), a story adapted from Aristophanes' Lysistrata.[17]

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On May 19, 2014, Greenlee died in Chicago at the age of 83.[19] On June 6, 2014, Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History sponsored an evening of celebration in his honor, attended by his daughter Natiki Montano.[20]

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