WATCH VIDEO of Henry Louis Gates Jr.' recent interview with Spike Lee.

I FIRST INTERVIEWED Spike Lee in the spring of 1991 in his office at 40 Acres and a Mule Productions, located in the heart of the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. I was in the process of moving from Duke to Harvard to head the Department of Afro-American Studies in the fall. I had met Spike at a lecture he delivered before a standing-room-only crowd in Duke’s largest auditorium. Every black person in North Carolina seemed to be in that room, hanging on Spike’s every word. My wife and I had agreed to host a small reception in his honor afterwards at our home in Durham. Somehow, word leaked out; everyone who had been in the audience seemed to think that the reception was just another part of the price of their tickets! But it was a night to remember.

I was quite nervous about the interview. I admired Spike’s work enormously, especially his productivity, his artistic integrity and his entrepreneurial brilliance. Most of all, I loved his films and recognized, like just about everyone else, that this young man was a genius, the enfant terrible of black film, the one we had been waiting for, the person who could suss out the zeitgeist, then put it on the silver screen. I was nervous because I wanted the interview to be the best that had been done, or at least one that was memorable for him.

In the middle of the interview, for some reason, I asked Spike if he had ever taught college. He said no. When I asked why, he replied that no one had asked him. That was the opening I needed. I excused myself, as if I had to go to the bathroom. I ducked into an adjacent office, called Henry Rosovsky, the dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, had him dragged out of a meeting, apologized for claiming that this was an emergency, and then, in a whispering voice, asked if he knew Spike Lee’s work and if I could hire him, explaining that Lee was just down the hall, waiting for me to return from the bathroom.

Rosovsky was both delighted and intrigued by the audacity of the idea: The dean, it turns out, was a film junkie who loved Spike’s films, and he told me to go for it. I returned to Spike’s office, told him that Kwame Anthony Appiah and I were moving to Harvard to build “the Dream Team” of African-American studies and asked if he would be a part of it. He accepted on the spot. Spike taught for three years, two courses one day a week; he never missed a class, and he graded his own papers. Fourteen hundred Harvard kids showed up to enroll in his class on the first day, all begging to be admitted into a seminar of 30 students.

When I interviewed Spike Lee for Transition back in 1991, he had already, at 34, established himself as the freshest, most incendiary and most accomplished black filmmaker not just of his generation but of any generation. In the previous six years, he'd made five films for wide theatrical release: She's Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo' Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991). Malcolm X, which would be released a year later, was well under way.