Spike Lee on the legacy of ‘School Daze’ and his Atlanta ties

As busy as he can be, Spike Lee prioritizes finding the time to celebrate one of the most personal and significant of his films — School Daze. The director’s made-in-Atlanta second feature screens February 10 at the Fox Theatre, marking its 38^th anniversary. Lee will be on hand for an introduction.   

While School Daze screenings take place strategically across the country, returning to Atlanta is particularly special. “Coming down is like a reunion of frats, sororities, classmates,” Lee says over Zoom recently. “It’s like a family reunion cookout with the barbecue and the grill going when I have these.”

Released by Columbia Pictures and filmed at Atlanta University in 1987, School Daze was Lee’s follow-up to his attention-getting debut, She’s Gotta Have It, which cost only $175,000. School Daze was the director’s first studio film.

With a cast that included Samuel L. Jackson, Ossie Davis, Giancarlo Eposito and Laurence Fishburne, the musical comedy charted the chaos that takes place among undergraduates at a historically black college during homecoming week. It’s based on Lee’s four years at Morehouse College. The director himself starred as student Darrell “Half-Pint” Dunlap, and people come up to him to this day, he says, and repeat some of Half-Pint’s dialogue.

Almost four decades after he made it, Lee is proud that the themes of School Daze still resonate and that the film made a difference.

“The most important thing about this is it introduced generations of people who had not seen the experience of Black colleges and universities,” Lee says. “For years, people said they went to Black colleges and universities because of School Daze, and they became very successful in the fields they chose to follow. That is the legacy. When you do something that deeply affects the path of people’s life, that is important.”

Born in Grady Hospital in 1957, Lee lived in Atlanta for a year with his family before they moved to Chicago and then to Brooklyn. Growing up, he spent summers between Alabama and Atlanta with his grandparents. He referred to Atlanta as a second home before he began attending Morehouse.

The director is a third-generation Morehouse man. His father, Bill Lee (Class of 1951), and his grandfather, Richard Jackson Shelton (Class of 1926), also attended. Bill Lee was a freshman at Morehouse when Dr. Martin Luther King was a senior, while MLK III and Spike were together as part of the class of ’79. 

Additionally, both Spike’s mother and grandmother are Spelman College graduates — Jacqueline Shelton (Class of 1954) and Zimmie Shelton (Class of 1929). “My mother and my grandmother went to Spelman, and that is where they coupled, so I have a deep, deep love for Spelman and Morehouse and HBCUs.”

The School Daze screenings honor those universities and their history. “We had to have these schools because people like Gov. George Wallace stood in the door (to block Black students at the University of Alabama). Look at Little Rock, Arkansas, where President Eisenhower had to send a National Guard so these young Black kids could go to high school. These institutions had to be there because we were not allowed to go to these other schools, and we knew that we had to be educated. It was out of necessity.”

The film that followed School Daze — the landmark Do the Right Thing — won Lee an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. In all, he has directed more than 30 films and finally won an Academy Award for his adapted screenplay of BlacKkKlansman.

Although Lee’s father did not care for films, his mother loved them and — not wanting to go alone — would take her oldest son with her. Eventually, Spike would become a proud cinephile himself.

The director is pulling hard for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners at this year’s Oscar ceremony. While he was in Los Angeles, Coogler called him and checked on his availability to attend an early screening. “I am never in LA. If I am in LA, I fly out of JFK the first flight out — and that same night, I am flying back to New York. Ryan said he was looking at the final print and wanted to know if I could get there in an hour. What is the chance of me being in LA? It was a whim (that he called me). Throughout the screening, I was jumping up and down, yelling, laughing, applauding like I was front row at Madison Square Garden and (the New York Knicks) were kicking the Celtics’ ass. I was floating when I came out of the screening. We’re close. There is nothing but love and respect between us two.”

Throughout his career, Lee feels lucky that he’s been able to make the films he wants to — and able to deal with themes such as identity and racism. “People have their wheelhouse. You define where you do your best. For me, I came to learn I was a storyteller, and the films I make are the stories I want to tell. I was born to be a filmmaker.”

Where & when

School Daze screens at the Fox Theatre at 7:30 p.m. February 10.

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Jim Farmer is the recipient of the 2022 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Theatre Feature and a nominee for Online Journalist of the Year. A member of five national critics’ organizations, he covers theater and film for ArtsATL. A graduate of the University of Georgia, he has written about the arts for 30-plus years. Jim is the festival director of Out on Film, Atlanta’s LGBTQ film festival, and lives in Avondale Estates with his husband Craig.