What makes the best successful? How do they ultimately reach their goals? That’s what we asked Spike Lee, the provocative, award-winning filmmaker of such classics as Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, and Elaine Jones, the former president and director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In her classic, Take a Lesson: Today’s Black Achievers on How They Made it & What They Learned Along the Way, Editor-At-Large Caroline V. Clarke discovered how they reached the pinnacle of their careers and still retained their integrity, enthusiasm, and sense of mission.
SPIKE LEE
CEO
FORTY ACRES AND A MULE FILMWORKS
I always visualized myself being successful at making films. If I couldn’t have done this, I don’t know what I would have done. I never even thought about it. I never thought, what if this doesn’t happen, what else could I do? I didn’t want to be a filmmaker until my sophomore year in college. But once I knew that’s what I wanted to do, I was going to make it happen. There was no other choice.
I believe in destiny. But I also believe that you can’t just sit back and let destiny happen. [The former Major League Baseball manager] Branch Rickey had a famous saying: Luck is the residue of design. A lot of times, an opportunity might fall into your lap, but you have to be ready for that opportunity. You can’t sit there waiting on it. A lot of times you have to get out there and make it happen.
I have always been driven in that way, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence of that early on. My mother, Jacqueline Lee, was the one who pushed me and my sister and brothers. My father had expectations for us, but his way was the hands off, natural way. His philosophy was, let them do whatever they want and somehow they’ll do the right thing. So my mother had to be the bad cop, the enforcer. All of us were expected to excel. I remember, if I came home with a B, she’d say, “Well, I bet a lot of those Jewish kids are bringing home A’s.”
So very early on it was instilled that we couldn’t just be as good as our fellow white classmates. We had to be three, four, five times better if we really wanted to get ahead and make a way. And she did a great job of explaining that it is not fair, it’s not right, but that’s the way it is.
My father went to Morehouse, my grandfather went to Morehouse, and my mother and grandmother went to Spelman. Since I
was the first born, it was expected that I go to Morehouse, and I had no problem with that. It was just a great feeling being in an environment in which all your classmates and all your teachers were African Americans. And it wasn’t just Morehouse. It was being part of the whole Atlanta University Center—Spelman and Clark and Morris Brown. It was just a great time and it definitely changed me.That’s where I got a lot of my nurturing and that’s where I decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
My family was 100% supportive of my wanting to be a filmmaker because we were raised in a very artistic household. My father was a jazz musician and composer. We grew up going to see him play at Newport Jazz Festival, and the Bitter End in New York. His attitude was, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead and do it. My mother taught art and black literature, so she was taking me and my siblings to museums and Broadway shows and stuff like that at an early age. So we were very lucky. We were just brought up in a family where art was always pushed.
I’m also lucky that not just my parents, but my grandparents, had the same attitude. Because I have a lot of friends who graduated with me from Morehouse in the class of 1979, and today, a lot of these guys are old, fat, and bald, and they’re miserable because they’re doing something that they don’t like.
It was my experience in school that a whole lot of people were taking majors in things that they didn’t want, but they were told to take [them] because they were expected to make money. Even [my wife] Tonya, from a very early age, she knew from her parents that she had to go to law school or med school. So she went to law school. For a lot of people art is just really discouraged. Especially in schools like Morehouse, which is a very strong business-oriented school.
But at Morehouse a lot of these kids were either the first or second ones in their family to ever go to college and at great sacrifice. So it’s like, “Look, your mother and I did not work two jobs and spend all this money to send your black [behind] through college so that you could be a singer or a poet or a painter. Your [behind] needs to get a job where you’re going to be getting a check every two weeks.”
I understand that. I really do. But I still think that it makes for a lot of miserable people, especially people who have creativity. And I’m just happy my parents weren’t like that.
There are people who are doing whatever they’re doing for money. And you have people doing what they’re doing for love. For me, it’s always been the latter. I never equated my being successful with money, because that’s not why I became a filmmaker.
I became a filmmaker because I wanted to tell stories and, when you break it down, that’s what directors do—the good ones, at least—they tell stories. That’s what I wanted to do, and I wanted to be in control of my work. So that meant that I would produce it, I would write it, and I would direct it. That was success to me.
That’s not to say that I don’t like to make an income from some of my stuff. But that was never the sole purpose, to be famous or be so-called wealthy. All that stuff is a by product.
I was not self-guided. Anytime I came to two forks in the road, people or events or spirits or forces pointed me in the right direction. Whenever I could have gone this way or that way, I always managed somehow to get pushed, prodded, or pulled the right way.
So you have to have people you respect and listen to. But it’s important who you listen to. I don’t listen to the Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences]. I listen to people I trust and work with, and Tonya. She’s very smart and very sensitive. Those are the qualities I admire in people, but I put a premium on intelligence. She’s the first one who reads, as soon as I finish a script. Whenever I’m thinking about doing something, she’s the first one I tell. Everybody has peers and people they respect. You have to listen to those people, not to the hype and not to the people who just don’t know.
ELAINE R. JONES
FORMER PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR-COUNSEL
NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND INC.
I knew from the age of 8 or so that I wanted to be a lawyer. There was so much wrong in the world. I mean, we were sitting in the back of the bus, going to segregated schools, living a life mapped out by signs that said “colored only.” Little girl that I was, in my community I would see the policemen come down the street. They were all white, with big guns. And the community would quiver and shake: Cop on the block. Folks would go down to the precinct, and you’d never hear from them again. All of this
My father was a railroad man and he had a little landscape gardening business on the side and a lot of his clients were lawyers—all white. He wouldn’t call their names, but he’d talk about “Lawyer this, lawyer that.” I heard that, and I saw all the wrong in our world and I thought lawyers were supposed to right the wrong. So I had to be a lawyer.
I know my parents said to themselves, “Elaine will never be a lawyer.” But they never said it to me. When people would say, “Well, what do you want to do when you grow up?” I’d say, “I want to be a l
awyer.” They’d pat me on the head, a little condescending pat, you know. My parents, standing there, would always say, “Well, be whatever you want to be.”
They were patronizing me, that’s clear. But they would always say, “Sister (because my older brother called me “sister”) you’re going to be whatever you want to be.” Only one time, my mother showed her hand by mistake. In my second year at Howard, I was taking all these political science and economic courses—now, she’d been hearing this lawyer thing for years—and she kept saying, “No education courses?”
Then she wrote me a letter in my junior year—I have it to this day. She said, “Sister, listen, it’s fine, and I know you’re going to be a wonderful lawyer. But it would be helpful if you would take some education courses. Just take some education courses. You may not need to use them, but I may even be able to get you on in Norfolk.” Momma was teaching elementary school there and she knew the woman down at the school board, so she wrote, “I may be able to get you on with Mrs. So-and-so, but I can’t do anything for you if you don’t have the courses.” That was her way of letting me know to get real.
My sister and I have compared notes. Momma did the same thing to her. To please her, my sister took three education courses; I took two. Today, my sister is a judge.
If you let someone else set your standard, whether it’s physical appearance, academic achievement, or economic success, then you will never be content with who you are. You have to maintain an edge, to keep pushing. But your purpose should be to set your own standard, not to catch up to or beat out somebody else. To always be thinking, “I wish I had” or “I wish I was like so and so…” keeps us from looking at ourselves and appreciating who and what we are as individuals. You must have your own inner compass.
Once you can really value your individuality, you have all you need. That’s self-worth and self-esteem, and I really believe that once you have that, you can handle whatever comes. Particularly in your beginning teen years, it’s very hard to be an individual when you’re in a group. But that’s where it’s got to begin. You don’t have to go where everybody else goes. You don’t have to do what everybody else does. That’s the lesson of a lifetime.
I never heard my folks say, “Your brother’s doing this,” or “Your sister is doing that.” I was the middle child and they never did compare us. I don’t know whether that was by design, but the three of us were so different, and they deal with us as individuals. It makes a difference. I believe it helped a lot.
I don’t know if it was youth, or what, but we were a bit judgmental in our college days. I remember that very clearly. You have to be careful of that. I don’t judge people the way I used to, because I now realize that I’m not walking in their shoes. These days I’m busy trying to understand why people react the way they do, or behave, or think the way they think. Rather than judging them based on my own perspective, I’m trying to understand their perspective. Maybe it’s because of the role I have to play here at the Legal Defense Fund.
I remember what Nathaniel Jones told me (he’s on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and used to be general counsel to the NAACP) when I was thinking about it. He said, “Elaine, it’s not a job. It’s a calling. There’s not anything for you to decide. You have to do this.” And then I had a practical consideration: If I said no, I would have had to leave.
You can’t stay at a place where you’re unwilling to take on the burdens of helping the organization do what it must do—at least that’s what I believe.
From Take a Lesson: Today’s Black Achievers on How They Made It & What They Learned Along the Way, by Caroline V. Clarke. Copyright © 2001. Published by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons Inc. All rights reserved.