Samuel Eldred Greenlee Jr. was born on July 13, 1930, in Chicago. His mother Desoree Alexander was a singer and dancer in the chorus line of the Regal Theatre. His father, Samuel Greenlee Sr, a railroad man and union activist, was of Native American descent (with a Seminole grandmother married to a Buffalo Soldier, an escapee from a slave plantation who fought in a "coloured" regiment at the end of the civil war). He received a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1952, served as an Army officer and studied international relations at the University of Chicago before joining USIA.,
With his younger brother, Donald, Sam grew up on the city's South Side, becoming active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at the age of 15 in response to white students protesting at being schooled alongside black pupils. Despite the segregationist policies of the US Board of Education, he was an achiever. Having attended James McCosh grammar school and Englewood High, he "played catch-up" at three universities: Wisconsin, Chicago and, much later, Thessaloniki.
After a two-year stint as a lieutenant in the US Army, 31st Infantry "Dixie" Division, Sam joined the foreign service of the US Information Service. He served in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia and Greece, earning a meritorious service award for activities during the 1958 Kassem revolution in Baghdad, experiences that inform his 1976 novel Baghdad Blues. After leaving the foreign service, he stayed on in Greece for several years. In later decades he also lived in Spain and in Ghana, before eventually returning to his home city. An unpublished autobiography is entitled Sam's Blues: Adventures of a Travelling Man.
Greenlee was named poet laureate of Chicago in 1990. His other published books were Be-Bop Man/Be-Bop Woman, 1968-1993: Poetry and Other Raps (1995), Ammunition!: Poetry and Other Raps (1975) and Blues for an African Princess (1971).
His marriage to Nienke Greenlee ended in divorce, and he had a daughter, Natiki M. Pressley, from a long-term relationship with Maxine McCrey, and a granddaughter, Nailah Pressley. Greenlee lived in Ghana and Spain for years before returning to his native Chicago in the late 1980s. He taught screenwriting at Chicago's Columbia College, was the host of a radio talk show, wrote poetry and completed an autobiography shortly before his death in Chicago on May 19, 2014 at age 83.
