“I said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’” Greenlee remembered. ![]() State Department canceled a tour by Duke Ellington, deeming “hot jazz” inappropriate for the planned concerts honoring slain president John F. Over time he grew disenchanted with Foreign Service work and wanted to pursue writing full time. Information Agency from 1957 to 1965, one of the first Black officials in the USIA. Though his novel no doubt shocked some audiences, Greenlee seems to have been neither subversive when he belonged to the Foreign Service nor secretive about his attitudes when he left. “If the idea makes you pale,” wrote a Chicago Sun-Times reviewer in 1969, “you are probably pale to begin with.” Playing the part expected of him, he rises to the rank of special assistant to the director, with the responsibility “to be black and conspicuous”-that is, to sit by the door-“as the integrated Negro of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America.” Secretly, Freeman is becoming “the best undercover man the CIA had.” He gathers intelligence and acquires experience that he ultimately takes back to Chicago, where he resumes his career in social work as a cover for his plan: to organize the city’s street gang members into a force he hopes will stoke a countrywide militant uprising. When the agency institutes a special training program for prospective Black officers and Freeman becomes the lone recruit to make it through the course, he is named chief of the top-secret reproduction section, a glorified clerical position. senator with an ulterior political motive: to shore up re-election support from Black voters. In his tale of subversive infiltration, the protagonist enters the CIA through a racial integration program launched at the behest of a U.S. ![]() Greenlee, X’57, wrote the best-selling novel, which later became a cult-classic film, after spending eight years in the U.S. The 1969 thriller, about the first Black agent recruited to the Central Intelligence Agency, gives the hero Dan Freeman a moniker familiar as both a racial epithet (“because we’re supposed to be scared of ghosts,” said Greenlee, who died in 2014) and a slang term for intelligence agents (“because they’re supposed to be invisible”).īut his sardonic wordplay, Greenlee insisted, had a third layer of meaning: “that an armed revolution by Black people haunts White America, and has for centuries.” Sam Greenlee described the title of his first and best-known novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, as more than just a double meaning.
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