Jackson’s political education

Samuel L. Jackson was not always a badass, said Stephen Rebello in Playboy. As a black kid growing up in racially segregated Chattanooga, Tenn., he was bookish and had a stutter, and his family taught him to keep his head down. “My family would point to this or that person as a Klansman or a grand wizard and tell me who specifically those men had killed and gotten away with it just because they’d said that black person was doing this or that. You could not look suspicious, because when people can accuse you of anything, there’s nothing you can say.” But as he grew up amid the civil rights movements of the 1960s, he became politicized, and joined the Black Power movement. “I was a militant revolutionary dude,” he says. “I went to Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in Atlanta after his assassination, and I joined a march for equal rights down in Memphis.” He got kicked out of Morehouse College in Atlanta after he helped take an entire board of trustees hostage in a 1969 campus protest. “A bunch of us had issues with the curriculum and the way the school was run. We asked to meet with the board of trustees. They said they didn’t have time for us. We went inside the building, chained the doors, and it was like, ‘Got time for us now?’”

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