Samuel L. Jackson's forgotten past as a student activist who held MLK Sr. hostage resurfaces

Samuel L. Jackson has become a household name over the last few decades. A person would have to work extraordinarily hard to avoid knowing who the award winning actor is after his long movie career. Whether you know him for his foul mouthed rants in Pulp Fiction, his skills with his purple light saber in Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace or as the gnarled Nick Fury in various Marvel films, you likely don't know much about his earlier years.

Jackson was born in 1948, and while he was born in Washington, D.C., he was raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee with his mom and her parents. Given the year in which he was born, much of his education took place during segregation. Growing up in this environment understandably led to a lot of internal rage that Jackson found hard to articulate as a child. While his grandfather was there to help him navigate injustices, it was a lot for him to take on.

"I had anger in me. It came from growing up suppressed in a segregated society. All those childhood years of ‘whites only’ places and kids passing you on the bus, yelling, ‘Ni**er!’ There was nothing I could do about it then. I couldn’t even say some of the things that made me angry—it would have gotten me killed," Jackson explained to Parade Magazine in 2005.

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But it was the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that pushed Jackson into radicalization. At the time, he was a student at Morehouse College, a historically Black college (HBCU) in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. King laid in state at Spellman, the sister college and Jackson attended his funeral. He then flew to Memphis to protest, which further motivated his political radicalization at the time.

"I was angry about the assassination,” he shared with Parade in 2005, “but I wasn’t shocked by it. I knew that change was going to take something different—not sit-ins, not peaceful coexistence.”

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In 1969 while still a college student, Jackson and several of his classmates decided to hold the Morehouse College Board of Trustees hostage until they met their demands of changing the governing structure and including classes on Black studies. One of the members of the board was none other than Martin Luther King Sr.

When he took the board of trustees hostage, he had no interest in what Morehouse had to offer. "Morehouse was breeding politically correct negroes,” Jackson says in the book detailing his life, Bad Motherf*cker (2021). “They were creating the next Martin Luther Kings. They didn’t say that because, really, they didn’t want you to be that active politically, and they were more proud of the fact that he was a preacher than that he was a civil-rights leader. That was their trip: they was into making docile negroes."

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Yes, Samuel L. Jackson once held Martin Luther King Jr.'s father hostage before eventually lowering him down out of a window when he began experiencing chest pains. The rest of the board members remained hostages until they agreed to meet the students' demands, which they did. To absolutely no one's surprise, Jackson was expelled after pulling that stunt, but that didn't stop his streak of radicalization. He quickly became familiar with the more extreme faction of the Black Power Movement where he found himself purchasing guns and ending up on the FBI's radar.

"But then one day, my mom showed up and put me on a plane to L.A. She said, ‘Do not come back to Atlanta.’ The FBI had been to the house and told her that if I didn’t get out of Atlanta, there was a good possibility I’d be dead within a year. She freaked out," Jackson said.

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Thanks to his mother's swift intervention, instead of being on America's Most Wanted, he honed his new found acting craft and became a sought after Hollywood star. After spending some time in Los Angeles, he was able to get re-enrolled in Morehouse which allowed him to graduate with a degree in drama to use his art for political commentary on a larger scale. Recently, he used his acting skills to play "Uncle Sam" at the Super Bowl Halftime show with Pulitzer Prize winning rapper Kendrick Lamar, a role reminiscent of his character in the 2012 film, Django Unchained

The halftime show itself was layered with meaning and Jackson's role was no exception. Throughout the performance Jackson, donning the infamous red, white and blue Uncle Sam costume, interrupts Lamar's performance attempting to correct his behavior. The idea is for "Uncle Sam" to reinforce respectability politics on Lamar and his dancers which is something Black American's have a long history dealing with.

The character is in stark contrast to Jackson's past behaviors and his personal politics in real life, which makes his role as Uncle Sam that much more nuanced. It could also be seen powerful critique of how some Black activists evolve into becoming the enforcer of rules they once fought against. Kahlil Greene, a Peabody Winner known for his concise breakdowns and analyses of US culture on his TikTok page 'Gen Z historian' shares his take on the significance of Jackson's role during the halftime performance.

"Now decades later the same man who fought against the establishment is now embodying it as Uncle Sam in the Super Bowl performance. That's a full circle moment, because on one hand we should know that Jackson does not represent the ideals of this character in his real life, but on the other hand it forces us to ask what happens when revolutionaries grow older and sometimes become representative of the same establishments that they once fought against, " Greene says. It's definitely interesting to know his past and see him play such a controversial symbol of American history, and viewers definitely got the point.

Jackson no longer practices his activism through taking hostages, but he is using his global platform as a Hollywood actor in revolutionary ways.