..I never will forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slavery's total horror. It made such an impact upon me that it later became one of my favorite subjects when I became a minister of Mr. Muhammad's. The world's most monstrous crime, the sin and the blood on the white man's hands, are almost impossible to believe." (Malcolm X, p. 1) It was upon these revelations that Malcolm

Malcolm X: Director Spike Lee's Portrait Of An American Hero Malcolm X was not a man who could be easily characterized and the same is true for Spike Lee's 1992 film. Malcolm X was a labor of love for Lee, who was only thirty-five at the time of the film's release. Lee had been a young child when Malcolm X was assassinated, so his knowledge of the man was not based

..That's why black prisoners become Muslims so fast when Elijah Muhammed's teachings filter into their cages by way of other Muslim convicts. 'The white man is the devil' is a perfect echo of that black convict's lifelong experience." Prison solidified Malcolm X's -- and in his view, all African-Americans' -- position in society, and his faith clarified the predicament and gave an avenue both of understanding and of redress. Everyone's childhood, family,

However, many other strands of thought have converged to create a collective black identity and historiography. For example, the syncretic slave religions that merged African practices with Christianity allowed slave families and communities to hold on to their ancestry and traditions in the face of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual oppression. Similarly, the creation of the African Episcopal Church (AME) in the early nineteenth century marked a distinctive and

" (Malcolm X, p. 1) That he segues here into a discussion on how education has so often been used to spread a mythological history casting white men as heroic underscores the latent hostility toward the traditional education he was never afforded. By contrast, Rodriguez is afforded this education and yet, for many of the same reasons, is moved to decry it. Rodriguez tells by sharp contrast to Malcolm X of

Some might also argue that unity of white people was also necessary to fix society, but this was certainly not Malcolm X's point. He gets his point across even more emphatically in the second half of his speech by speaking directly about the differences in approach and effect between the main leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and the grassroots participants that made up the bulk of the people demanding