- And you can catch "Fat Ham" at Detroit Public Theater through November 3rd.

- Award-winning actor Roger Guenveur Smith was in Detroit recently for three solo performances at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

"American Black Journal" contributor, Cecelia Sharpe of 90.9 WRCJ, sat down with Smith to talk about his long acting career and his many collaborations with filmmaker Spike Lee.

- Roger, literacy played a huge role in your upbringing.

Your mother had a library at home.

And you were a book buff, a history buff.

(Roger laughs) - I was the kid who read the "Encyclopedia Britannica" for fun.

I was the kid who was obsessed with a book called "The World's Great Men of Color," edited by J.A.

Rogers, which my mom had in our home library.

I was the kid who read "The Narrative of the Life of an American Slave" written by himself by Frederick Douglass, 1845.

I was about 10 years old.

I didn't know all of the words in there, but it obviously made an impression upon me.

And when I was looking for an opportunity to do a solo performance when I was an undergraduate, I thought, "Ah, Frederick Douglass."

Well, where did that come from?

That came from that very slim volume that was in our very modest home library.

- And as you moved through your journey from those books in the library at home into college, you were at Yale studying history.

- [Roger] Yes.

- But you decided that you should audition for the Drama School at Yale.

Now did you have an undiscovered acting bug that you knew about that everyone else didn't know about?

Or was this something that you decided like, "Hey, I wanna try this."

How did that come about?

- I had always been interested in performance.

And, you know, the first Frederick Douglass solo performance was called "An Evening with Frederick Douglass," which was a very long evening.

And my own mom told me that it was too long.

So, you know, you need to edit; you need to cut.

- Yeah; oh, absolutely.

'Cause if your mom is tired of watching it, you know you have to do something about it.

- But going to school for history made sense to me.

But also auditioning for the drama school made sense to me.

And I auditioned, and I was accepted into a distinguished class which included Angela Bassett and John Turturro and Charles Dutton.

And I got to work with Mr. James Earl Jones, whom we recently lost.

And he invited me into his dressing room.

I was just a student moving, you know, furniture around.

But he was so kind and so giving.

And his notes took up the entire script.

He was dyslexic.

And as we know, he stuttered as a boy.

And he overcame that, obviously.

So it was fascinating to be welcomed into that world and to be given that kind of inspiration.

And I'm hoping that I can inspire in the same way, passing the baton on to the next generation - Spike Lee.

- Yes.

- You were able to come in at such just a creative time with "Do the Right Thing," "School Daze," and collaborate and work with him.

- I never thought that I would have a career in film.

I was really happy to be playing a season at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

And I went to see this film called "She's Gotta Have It."

And I sat through it twice.

And I said, "Who is this guy Spike Lee?

"And what is he doing next?"

So I was able to finagle a cattle call audition.

- How did you finagle this cattle call?

Is this top secret?

- No, just like everybody else.

I mean, I stood in line with 100 other people to tell a joke, you know, sing a song, and do a little bit from the script for this film called "School Daze."

And Spike Lee thought that I was demented enough to play a, you know, fraternity pledge named Yoda.

And we've been working together ever since.

But yes, very blessed to be in the same generation as Shelton Jackson Spike Lee.

And I think that we have seen eye to eye, although he's considerably shorter than I am.

(Cecelia laughs) But we do see eye to eye culturally, historically, politically.

And it's been a great collaborative venture.

And it's actually unparalleled in the American cinema.

There's no actor, director, writer, producer collaborations that are comparable to the one that I have enjoyed with Spike.

- I wanna get to that, but before we elaborate on that, you had a lot of creative ability when it came to "Do the Right Thing."

- [Roger] Yes.

- There was the script, but your character wasn't even in the script.

You were able to build and create your character.

What was the inspiration behind Smiley?

- Well, I didn't realize what the inspiration was specifically until after I had done Smiley.

I knew from the draft of "Do The Right Thing," which Spiked shared with me very generously, that Malcolm X had a big influence on this piece.

There was a Malcolm quote, which was attached to the script as a prologue, not the one that's used at the end of the film but another one.

So I knew that somehow, Malcolm was, you know, working on this thing.

And Spike gave me this draft and said, "Take this home, Roger, and come back the next morning "and see what you come up with."

And I say, "Okay."

So I started thinking about Malcolm.

And then I started thinking about Martin.

And then I started thinking about the whole issue of having Black people up on this wall, the Wall of Fame.

And then I started thinking about this photograph of Malcolm X shaking hands with Martin Luther King, which at that time was a very, very obscure image.

But Spike knew it and I knew it.

"And I said, "Okay.

"Well, what if this guy has a stack of these photographs "that he's personally colorizing, "and he's trying to sell them up and down the block?

"And then, at the end, when the pizza parlor burns down, "then why not put this picture of Malcolm and Martin "up on the wall after it's been burned down?"

He said, "Yeah, bet, that's a good idea."

(Cecelia laughs) "Yeah, I like that."

You know, the rest is history.

- Right.

- As we went through the film improvising scenes, Smiley actually became the arsonist.

He was the one who burned down the pizza parlor.

And when I was thinking about, "Ah, where did this come from," 'cause people were asking me.

In fact, people had thought that Spike had hired a disabled person to play Smiley, which I suppose is a compliment to what I was doing.

- [Cecelia] 'Cause (indistinct) that invested.

- But I lived in Bed-Stuy when we were doing it.

A lot of people saw me on set.

And they, you know, were reacting to me in a certain way in the community.

So after the film came out, people said, "Well, where did that come from," when they realized that that wasn't really me.

And I started thinking, and I thought about a man who sold the "LA Sentinel" newspaper, the Black newspaper in Los Angeles.

And my father would go every Thursday night to support him and get his paper from him.

- And you'd be with him.

- And I would be with him.

And I'd be looking up at this very tall man who talked like this and said, "Th-thank you" every Thursday.

And then I thought about, "Okay, well, that must have been influential."

A young man who was a great athlete at my high school, but he was hit by a car.

And he talked like that too.

And he became the locker room attendant after having been a great athlete.

And he's the guy whose passing out towels.

He talked like that, but he had an amazing memory for athletic statistics.

He could name any end zone, any, you know, team, who scored what in what game, and all that.

He had an amazing memory for that.

So I said, "Oh, okay, yeah."

And he had an influence as well.

And then I started thinking about where did the artistry come from?

Well, it was a guy named Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was a friend of mine.

And he, of course, his signature was the crown, which I used on top of M-m-m-m-m-martin King and the X crossing out words, which I used on M-m-m-malcolm X.

And the great, you know, tragedy of this thing is when I was in Brooklyn playing Smiley, creating this character, doing "Do the Right Thing," Jean-Michel expired in Manhattan.

- How did that impact you during that time, losing your friend while filming "Do the Right Thing?"

- It's something that continues to resonate with me today.

And I suppose that's why I'm doing this piece called "In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Because it's necessary for me as a friend, as a brother to share with the world what, what he means, continues to mean to me and to the world.