Samuel L Jackson revealed he once experienced racial profiling after a run-in with the police over two decades ago.
In a powerful piece for Vanity Fair, the 67-year-old recounted an incident in which he fell victim to discriminative law enforcement way back when he first emerged on the Hollywood scene
While shooting the iconic Pulp Fiction, Samuel found himself filling in the gaps between filming by starring in a theatre production in LA.
After wrapping up his performance one night, the budding actor joined his friends at a nearby restaurant and it was on his journey home Samuel encountered the policemen.
“All of a sudden, five sheriffs’ cars screeched up. The policemen surrounded us, guns pointed, lights in our face: ‘Get on the ground!’,” Samuel recalled.
“There we were, lying face down in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. I finally said to the cops, ‘Why are you doing this?’ One of them said, ‘Oh, we got a report of five black guys standing on the corner with guns and bats’.
“I said, ‘So when you pulled up and didn’t see a bat – I mean, maybe we could’ve had a gun concealed on us, but you didn’t see anything that looked like a bat. Whatever’.”
Despite the star assuming racial police tactics a thing of the past, Samuel admitted the eye-opening incident had an effect in the way he held himself while in LA – and still does to this very day.
He said: “I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m in Hollywood now, on the verge of breaking through, and this is still going on.’
“It kind of put my feet back on the ground in terms of ‘O.K., you’re still just another n***** working in town, so you still got to walk softly.’
“And I still do.”
Read Samuel L Jackson’s passionate essay in full here.
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