Content area
Full Text
Malcolm X: Make It Plain. Prod. by Orlando Bagwell and Judy Richardson. Blackside, 1994. 150 mins. (PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314-1698)
More widely known after his death than before, Malcolm X has joined Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of the two foremost African. American icons of the 1960s. Yet, unlike King, Malcolm has received remarkably little serious attention from biographers and historians. Most accounts of his life and ideas rely on the popular image that Malcolm created through his apocalyptic speeches and the vivid autobiography written with the help of Alex Haley. With the possible exception of Bruce Perry's idiosyncratic Malcolm (1991), no biography has systematically probed the documentary evidence of Malcolm's life and thereby penetrated the succession of public identities he invented for himself.
This failure to delve deeply has been obvious in film documentaries about Malcolm and in Spike Lee's dramatized version of Malcolm's life. Celebrating Malcolm as an exemplar of racial uplift, redemption, and...