Lessons from Sam Greenlee: The convergence of literature and Black militancy

It should be said from the get-go, Sam Greenlee is one of my favorite authors. The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a masterful work of fiction that was build up from the very real ebbs and flows of the Black radical movement in the United States. The book was strongly based on the real-life experiences of the author Sam Greenlee himself who worked within the American foreign service. The protagonist of the book is the first Black man to make it into and pass the CIA’s training to become an agent. Secretly, he is a radical Black nationalist who uses his position within the government to provide intel and arms to Black guerrilla moments in the United States.

“So I--I decided to write it instead of doing it” Is what Greenlee said in a HistoryMakers interview about his creation of the book. Greenlee himself was a member of the United States’ foreign service and was conflicted about his role there. Greenlee was offered several positions to work with the street gangs of Chicago in a remedial capacity to educate and steer them from illicit activity, but Greenlee turned them down stating it was a group run by “intelligence people”.

Through his own experience working for the foreign service and intimate knowledge of the radical Black underground, Greenlee was reluctant to have any affiliation with the FBI who were eagerly yearning for his perspective and scientific analysis of Black radicalism. Greenlee’s book has since been transformed into a film (one of my favorites) that demonstrates the viable potentiality of Black rebellion should the masses of Black people understand their relation to the United States government.

Something I like about Greenlee is that he is not simply an author, but a tactician, a historian and a political theorist. These are all the dimensions of Greenlee that are captured within his book and a reason the book had been studied by the FBI for a year to decipher the lessons and potential ‘threat’ of Black insurgency.