Blog Version of Facts I like: Samuel L Jackson

The first fact that I will deep dive on this blog is Samuel L. Jackson being a pallbearer at Martin Luther King Jr's funeral. Honestly, it'll be about Samuel L. Jackson in general, but when I learned this fact, I knew I had to know more.

A little background about me is that I was a high school history teacher for a couple years, so I do consider myself a history nerd. To me, history is like gossiping about people and things in the past so what's not to love.

Back to Samuel L Jackson, everyone knows him as an actor playing iconic rolls such as Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction. But did you know that he also pretty active in the Civil Rights Movement?

Jackson was a teenager when the Civil Rights Movement was starting to pick up. He was a sophomore theatre major at Morehouse College when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was shot on April 4, 1968. After MLK was shot Jackson and his buddies headed to down to Memphis to assist in the garbage workers strike which was the reason MLK was down there in the first place. They then made their way to Atlanta where MLK's funeral would be. The funeral was so crowded that they were taking volunteers to help usher people around which is how Jackson got involved.

Prior to attending the strike and the funeral, he had never really been political. He was aware of what was happening but didn't really partake. Once he got back to school, he knew he wanted to be different, he didn't want to just sit back and watch, he wanted to partake. Starting off small(ish) he wanted to see a change within Morehouse College. He felt that the student body wasn't being heard. There was no student involvement on the board. There wasn't even a black studies class at this HBCU. So, he petitioned to meet with the board to voice his concerns and was denied. Jackson and his friends had heard about lock-ins happening across the country, so they decided to do something similar by locking themselves and the board in a room together to force them to listen. This lock-in lasted a day and half. Jackson negotiated that they wouldn't get kicked out of school however, once the rest of the student body left for the summer, they were suspended for 2 years.

That summer, Jackson moved down to Atlanta to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which is where he met Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and other members of the Black Panther Party. He is anti-war because his cousin that was his age died in Vietnam, so he began to feel very empowered in the Black Power Movement. While there, he began buying guns to be prepared for a revolution that they were fully convinced would happen. This put him on the FBI's radar as many of the Black Panthers were.

Somebody from the FBI actually went to his mother's home in Tennesse, tipped her off about the FBI, and told her she needed to get her son out of Atlanta before he got killed. She immediately drove down to his home, told him she was taking him to lunch, then dropped him off at the airport instead. She told him to get on the plan to Los Angeles, not turn around, and call her when he arrived at his aunt's house.

To this day, he denies being a part of the Black Panther Party, but he definitely played a role in the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be an Activist.

Thank you for attending my first deep dive on facts that I like, I hope you enjoyed or learned something :)