"Like a Comet Acrossthe Heavens"Charles Simmons says Spike Lee's film is agreat and important one, but it would taketwo or three more such films to do justice tothe life of Malcolm X. '

ames Baldwin came toHollywood in 1968,against the warnings ofhis friends and relatives,to write a script for amovie on EI Hadj Malik

EI Shabazz. But Baldwin, who had already writtenThe Fire Next Time and Nobody Knows My Name,could not accept the insulting changes the project'smanagers demanded. He abruptly packed his bagsfor Manhattan, and was back before anyone knewhe had left. Ernesto "Che" Guevara was the subjectof another film in the works at the same time. Hol-lywood, Baldwin thought, had reduced Guevaraand Fidel Castro to bumbling caricatures, and thesame fate awaited Malcolm X.

Fortunately, a later generation of African Ameri-can filmmakers has now begun to produce its ownperspective on history. The new filmmakers havealso proved themselves at the box office, leaving thefilm industry little to argue about on its way to thebank. It is against that background that Spike Leerescued the Malcolm project.

Even so, Lee's project, which pegs the story moreclosely to Alex Haley's and Malcolm's own Autobi-ography of Malcolm X, had to be saved at a crucialpoint in the filming by a cash infusion from suchcontributors as Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey. Theoriginal backers refused to provide additional fundsto finish the project.

The result has defied the naysayers once again.Malcolm X is a three-hour volcanic eruption ofdrama and acting that scorches every soul in itsaudiences. Viewers leave the theater moved to tears.

It is also as accurate as one could hope - no smallachievement for a film that tries to condense thelife of a giant who, as Jose Marti wrote about a greatpoet, "moved across the Earth like a comet acrossthe heavens." The film depicts a childhood of bitterpoverty, worsened when Malcolm's father is assas-sinated by the KKK for teaching Marcus Garvey na-tionalism; later, cold Michigan winters and equallyfrigid welfare bureaucrats drove his overburdenedmother into an avoidable insanity. The young Mal-colm Little, known as Detroit Red, storms throughthe night clubs of New York and Boston duringWorld War II, mastering the jitterbug, gambling,cocaine and women of all colors, until a judge(played, ironically, by civil rights attorney WilliamKuntsler with convincing fervor) hands him aseven-year prison sentence for burglary.

It is within these forsaken walls that the youngman, whose flashing eyes and red hair earn him thename "Satan," begins two of his greatest transfor-mations. He learns to read and write by memorizingthe dictionary, and he joins the Nation of Islam.

The Nation of Islam, led by the Honorable ElijahMuhammad - played by AI Freeman, who actuallylooks like "The Messenger" - won a growing urbanAfrican American following between the 1950s andthe 1970s. The media termed the religion simply"the Black Muslims." And Malcolm Little, DetroitRed, Satan, became Malcolm X.

BLACK NATIONALISMBlack Nationalism, closely associated with the

Abolitionist movement, was a major contributorboth to Marcus Garvey's movement during World

CHARLES SIMMONS wasthe United Nations corre-spondent for the newspa-per organized by MalcolmX, Muhammed Speaks. Heis currently Professor ofCommunication Studies,Califomia State University,Los Angeles.

February 1993 C R 0 S S R 0 ADS 11

Malcolm X in 1963.

War I and to the Nation of Islam, and a closer lookat its history would have been useful in the film.Its first expression was in thousands of slave rebel-lions that began with the first slave shipments inthe early 1600s - rebellions organized by Muslims,sailors, free Blacks and kidnapped Africans with acenturies-old heritage of independence and world-wide commerce and travel.

Such a history would have to include the Haitianrevolution, where Africans (led by Toussaint L'Ou-verture) became the first slaves in the Americas tofree themselves and join the ranks of that century'sliberated nations. The news sparked widespread re-volts in the West Indies and the southern UnitedStates, requiring emergency troop mobilizationsthat lasted through the Civil War.

It would also include numerous Back-to-Africamovements in the United States and the West Indiesin the last two centuries, some of which won thesupport of Abraham Lincoln. Until Reconstruction,it was widely assumed that former slaves would oneday be returned to Africa or the West Indies. It ac-tually happened in Liberia, where the U.S. installeda state peopled by its former slaves.

Spike Lee's Malcolm X leaves the impression thatBlacks joined the Nation of Islam solely because ittaught that whites and Christianity were the causeof fundamental dislocation in Black communities,thereby inspiring hatred of whites. But the primary

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causes of the Nation of Islam's expanding mem-bership lay elsewhere. The Nation showed successesin rehabilitating prisoners, drug addicts, prostitutesand a wide range of fallen and abandoned human-ity, giving them hope, dignity, discipline and em-ployment. A cursory glance at the communitiesaround Muslim Mosques revealed that Black-owned business spread and the fate of women andfamilies improved. Muslims would intervene tostop woman and child abuse in their communities,and their independent schools equipped youngpeople with a distinct, dignified behavior. Thesewere the main reasons that members followed Mr.Elijah Muhammad, and that huge crowds turnedout to hear the Nation of Islam national spokes-person Malcolm X. Malcolm, in turn, spoke to hisoverflowing audiences less and less of religious dif-ferences in the community and increasingly em-phasized unity and self-help.

Meanwhile, the film's treatment of the relation-ship between Malcolm and his wife, Betty Shabazz,filmed under the watchful eye of Mrs. Shabazz, setsa new standard for tenderness and warmth in a Hol-lywood movie.

Malcolm was painfully disillusioned by the ac-cusations that Elijah Muhammad, his hero and fa-ther figure, had been involved with young womenin the Nation of Islam and was the target of severalpaternity suits. Jealous ministers worked to exacer-bate the tension between the national spokesmanand his leader. After President John Kennedy's as-sassination, Malcolm's declaration that "the chick-ens have come home to roost" made national head-lines, and Muhammad silenced him for allegedlyendangering the organization.

When no amount of explanation seemed suffi-cient to restore his credibility or his relationshipwith the organization, Malcolm turned towardMecca. His pilgrimage to the Holy City of Islam,where he earned the name El Hadj Malik ElShabazz, marked the shift to the final phase in hislife. Malcolm discovered that Islam is an interna-tional religion that embraces members of all racesand colors as equals. From that discovery until hisdeath, his major concern was unity among all peo-ples struggling against oppression.

INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONIn a major international political shift, the Afri-

can struggle against old and new European coloni-alism was then taking an increasingly successfulturn. That shift, which the film does not mention,provided the context in which Malcolm founded anew sect of Islam, Muslim Mosque, Ine., and thesecular Organization of African American Unity,which took its lead from Africa's intergovernmentalOrganization of African Unity. El Hadj Malik ElShabazz was among the first of the centuries-longline of African nationalists in the Americas to es-

tablish official relations with Africa. His participa-tion in the annual conference of African heads ofstate instantly elevated the level of Pan-African, la-bor and human rights political activity in theUnited States beyond the scope of the traditionalcivil rights movement.

Even Malcolm's symbolic decision to charge theU.S. with genocide at the United Nations had deephistorical roots. In 1951, an interracial group ledby Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Attorney William Pat-terson had petitioned the United Nations for thesame charges.

To its credit, Malcolm X takes several quick shotsat CIA surveillance of Malcolm. But it offers no ex-planation of the massive FBI-CIA Cointelpro op-eration that, according to post- Watergate congres-sional testimony, targeted civil 'and human rightsactivists, journalists and religious and political lead-ers with "dirty tricks" and assassinations through-out the 1960s and '70s. The testimony reveals a longtarget list that included Patrice Lumumba, FidelCastro, Indonesia's Sukarno and many others.

There is no mention of French President CharlesDeGaulle, who would not let Malcolm re-enterParis for fear of CIA intrigue on French soil. Nordo we learn that Malcolm was poisoned at a con-ference of African presidents in Egypt, and rescuedby Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Malcolm's assassination should be viewed in thatlight. While it may be true that jealousy and hostilityamong some of Mr. Muhammad's followers in-spired them to participate in the murder, historyshows that gunmen in political shootings are sel-dom the significant cause of the event. Usually theyare merely paid mechanics.

Who had the motive, opportunity and means toconduct a multimillion dollar campaign of inter-national surveillance over a decade, beginning longbefore Malcolm's split with the Nation of Islam; toprepare a professional bombing of Malcolm'shome; to poison him in Egypt; to alert DeGaulle;to organize the continual harassment of the move-ment's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, including itsconfiscation at newsstands; to get the State Depart-ment to deny passports? Even if members of theNation of Islam had wanted to do those things, itis highly unlikely that they could have afforded it.

Spike Lee's film is a great and important one,but it would take two or three more such films todo justice to Malcolm's life. There is his work inthe late 1950s in support of Robert F. Williams, afreedom fighter in the struggle to defend Blacks ac-cused of kidnapping Klansmen who had driventhrough Black communities in Monroe, NorthCarolina firing guns at the residents. There is hishistoric meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr. at thecongressional civil rights debates in 1965. There ishis close friendship with boxer Muhammad Ali,who was perhaps the first major Black athlete to

oppose the Vietnam War and was stripped of histitle for it. There were the numerous speakers beforeMalcolm who established the tradition of streetcor-ner political debates, often in front of the MichauxBookstore on 125th Street, where Harlem listenedcarefully and argued and learned.

There was his warm meeting with Fidel Castroin 1960 at another Harlem shrine, the Theresa Ho-tel, which hosted Dr. Castro in spite of a U.S. gov-ernment ban. That scene, before the Bay of Pigs in-vasion or the October Missile Crisis, was the firsttime this writer recalls seeing Malcolm X. A huge,effervescent crowd of African Americans andPuerto Ricans celebrated at the top of their lungson 125th Street as Malcolm and the Cuban delega-tion looked on from the balcony, both of them de-fying the continuous harassment of the U.S. StateDepartment.

The newspaper Malcolm organized in the late1950s, Muhammad Speaks, is also missing from thefilm. Muhammad Speaks was a fighting voice of thehuman rights movement in the U.S. and the world,and one of the few consistent sources of informa-tion about Third World struggles against colonial-ism - rare in the establishment press even in 1992.Muslims selling the paper were a common sightthroughout major urban areas, and its circulationsurpassed 500,000 readers at its height. The news-paper lasted until Elijah Muhammad's death in themid-1970s.

The establishment press has consistently at-tempted to keep Malcolm safely and quietly hiddenaway in the grave while promoting - and sanitizing- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Even though onemight think, from the national posturing everyJanuary, that King had nothing but friends through-out the country, younger readers ought to knowthat the major media were almost as hostile to theliving and protesting Dr. King as they were to Mal-colm X. The truth is that both leaders made gallantcontributions to the human rights history of ourAmerica, and both had few friends in ruling classAmerica.

Embattled American history, now shaken to itsfoundations by the great debate over the ColumbusQuincentennial, must wipe the smog of misinfor-mation from its eyes once more and look with hopetoward the future. History is indebted to the rapgroups, to Spike Lee and to Pan-African Studiesprograms around the nation for their resurrectionof El Hadj Malik El Shabazz. Thanks are also dueto artists and activists such as Amiri Baraka, OssieDavis and Ruby Dee, and elder historian Dr. JohnHenrik Clark, who kept the pressure on Spike Leeto ensure accuracy. A PBS television documentarywill air this month, from the team that made thecivil rights series Eyes on the Prize; it will be stillanother contribution to understanding the heritageof Malcolm X. •

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