Boots Riley

Raymond Lawrence "Boots" Riley (born April 1, 1971), is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, rapper, and socialist activist. He is the lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club. He made his feature-film directorial debut with Sorry to Bother You (released July 2018), which he also wrote. Early life Riley was born in 1971 in Chicago into a family of social justice organizers. He is the son of Walter Riley, an African-American attorney, and Anitra Patterson, whose father was African-American and whose mother (Boots' maternal grandmother) was a Jewish refugee from Königsberg who fled Europe with her parents as a teenager in 1938. He is the second youngest of five siblings. By the time Boots was one, his family had moved to Detroit, and when he was six they moved to Oakland, where he later attended Oakland High School. When the school faced cutbacks in the 1980s, 2000 of Oakland High's 2200 students protested by participating in a walkout organized by Riley and friends. Interested in politics at a young age, Riley joined the International Committee Against Racism at age 14 and the radical Progressive Labor Party at age 15. Career