Focus Features on Monday announced that Lee’s newly retitled drama will be released Aug. 10. The film is about the real-life story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer in Colorado who went undercover in 1978 to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. John David Washington plays Stallworth in the film and Adam Driver plays his partner, Flip Zimmerman.

Among the film’s producers are “Get Out” director Jordan Peele and “Get Out” producer Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions

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“Today, 30 years later, people still come up to me and say, ‘Spike, you are the reason I went to a black school. I didn’t even know there were black schools. You are the reason I went to college. You the reason I am in this job,” Lee said. “That film really changed people’s lives.”

Lee, a 1979 graduate of Morehouse College, was in Atlanta Monday for a special anniversary screening of the movie at the Fox Theater.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms presented Lee with a Phoenix Award, one of the city’s highest civic honors.

Lee called Presidents Day “Barack Obama Day.”

“School Daze,” when it debuted in 1988, told of a homecoming weekend at the fictional Mission College in Atlanta.

The film, which was shot in Atlanta around the Atlanta University Center, was one of the first modern features shot in the city that has become a Southern Hollywood.

This weekend’s blockbuster, “Black Panther,” was shot in Atlanta.

Fresh off his feature debut, “She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee’s “School Daze,” tackled several controversial issues that had been otherwise self-contained as interior problems within the black community like class, gender, sex and ethnicity.

Over one weekend at Homecoming, students at Mission College addressed South Africa apartied and political activism, the politics of skin color and hair texture, sexual violence and indifference, and Greek life and hazing.

All set to music.

One of the driving narratives in the film is the conflict between the light-skinned “Wannabees” and the dark-skinned “jigaboos.” Two weeks after filming started, Hugh Morris Gloster the then-president of Morehouse College kicked the production off campus – in part, because he feared that the film would air, “dirty laundry.”

“The sad thing is that some of the stuff we were addressing in the film was happening to us,” Lee said.

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In addition to being an award-winning director, Lee is also a, Writer, Actor, Producer, Author, and NYU Grad Film Tenured Professor whose body of work has continued to grow over the last three decades. Lee co-wrote his latest film Chi-Raq with Kevin Willmott based on the Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes. He has directed and produced over 30 films since his first feature film, the independently produced She’s Gotta Have It which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986 and received the esteemed Prix de la Jeunesse Award. Lee continues to produce Cinematic works of Art that display his skill and ability to showcase outspoken and provocative socio-political critiques that challenge cultural assumptions, about Race, Class and Gender identity. His film, Do the Right Thing, released in 1989, earned Lee an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and remains still relevant today.

Lee has also produced several documentaries, including the Academy Award nominated 4 Little Girls and the Peabody and Emmy Award winning films When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, all with HBO. In addition to his Michael Jackson trilogy of Documentary, BAD 25, original ‘off the wall’ and the upcoming widely anticipated trailer. In addition to his prolific film career, Lee has directed and produced numerous music videos and his commercial work began in 1988 with his Nike Air Jordan campaign. Ever moving into new areas, Lee combined his extensive creative experience into yet another venture with DDB Needham to create Spike/DDB, a full-service advertising agency. Lee has also authored several books, including Five For Five, a pictorial

reflection of his first five features, Best Seat in the House, with Ralph Wiley, and two children’s books Please, Baby, Please and Please, Puppy, Please, co-authored with Tonya Lewis Lee, his wife.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, Lee returned south to attend Morehouse College. After graduation, he returned to New York City to continue his education at NYU/Tisch, where he received his MFA in Film Production. After graduation, he founded 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, based in Brooklyn. He began teaching a course on filmmaking at Harvard in 1991 and in 1993 he started on the Faculty at NYU/Tisch in the Graduate Film Program where he was appointed Artistic Director in 2002, a position which he still holds.

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