Who will speak for El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz?: hagiography and a missing identity in Malcolm X.

The hallmark of the traditional Hollywood biopic has been a refusal to deal with the most controversial aspects of the subject's life. Spike Lee's Malcolm X is no exception. His hagiography is in the mode of the classic Hollywood biopics of Benito Juarez, Madame Curie, and Louis Pasteur, while his avoidance of Malcolm X's ultimate political views is comparable to the denial of Cole Porter's homosexuality in Night and Day.

Lee's editorial timidity is first evident in the way in which Malcolm Little's criminal career is depicted. His drug addiction is made episodic rather than chronic, and his pimping activities are barely alluded to. The one major crime shown on screen is offered as light comedy. This sanitizing diminishes the tremendous effort required by Malcolm Little to become Malcolm X.

More troubling, however, is the nearly blank accounting of Malcolm's political evolution after his trip to Mecca, the period in which he took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Two eventful trips to Africa are entirely omitted. Viewers unfamiliar with Malcolm's life have no way of knowing he met with more than a dozen Arab and black African heads of state, many of whom had come to power through revolutionary movements and most of whom were socialists. These leaders counseled him to relate the African-American liberation struggle to pan-Africanism and other movements for cultural and national self-determination.

Rather than being shown as having increasingly important international contacts, Lee's post-Mecca Malcolm X is rendered as an isolated figure. He seems as politically adrift as claimed by Mike Wallace and Dan Rather in a 1992 CBS special. This view ignores the fact that Malcolm was creating a dynamic in which his participation in a new civil rights movement would be calculated to make state and federal authorities more amenable to dealing with Martin Luther King, Jr., as a lesser evil. Malcolm was also a classic autodidact who never stopped reading. His studies were now carrying him into new ideological ground. Associates have stated he was greatly impressed by his reading of C. L. R. James, the Afro-Caribbean Marxist, and by "The Colonial War at Home," a May-June 1964 editorial in the socialist Monthly Review.

A striking scene in Lee's film occurs when the pre-Mecca Malcolm curtly turns away a white woman who indicates her sympathy for his views. Just how far he had traveled from that orientation and why federal agencies were alarmed by his change can be seen in his developing relationship with the mostly white Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He spoke at its Militant Labor Forum twice in 1964, once at the SWP's invitation and once at his own request. He had been impressed that the SWP's weekly newspaper had been publishing his speeches verbatim, and at the time of his assassination, he was negotiating to have them printed as a book by the SWP's publishing arm. That project was completed by Betty Shabazz and the result, Malcolm X Speaks, long remained the only collection of his speeches. On another occasion, the SWP provided a translator when Malcolm was visited by French-speaking Africans. The long-term significance of this development is that even though many of his associates were wary of the SWP contact, Malcolm was willing to work openly with principled white allies, however radical their ideology.

Malcolm's major organizational effort post-Mecca was the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a group barely alluded to in the film and not composed only of those who had followed Malcolm out of the Nation of Islam. Among black radicals Malcolm was involving in his new organization were Max Sanford of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and Conrad Lynn, the attorney who was representing hundreds of African-American draft resisters. The RAM connection was important for RAM already had influence in the Atlanta office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had worked closely with the Philadelphia NAACP, and had members who would later help form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. RAM's honorary leader was Robert Williams, who had first come to prominence in the late 1950s as an exponent of armed self-defense. After being framed on a kidnapping charge, Williams had taken asylum in Cuba and then China.

Political outreaching of this kind makes it obvious that Malcolm was positioning himself to play a major role in the dissident movements of the 1960s. At the time he formed the OAAU, the antiwar movement and the New Left were still in their early stages, while the massive civil rights movement was just beginning to deal with the problems posed by urban rebellions. The potential impact of Malcolm X's direct participation within this constellation is unknowable, but the prospect was as ominous to the Establishment as it was exhilarating to rebels. J. Edgar Hoover was already in a frenzy to prevent the appearance of what he called "the Black Messiah." As various attempts on Malcolm's life were made, he stated the actions were too sophisticated to simply be the work of the Nation of Islam. In this context, Lee's evocation of unidentified government wiretappers and ludicrous CIA agents in Egypt is almost demeaning.

At the conclusion of Malcolm X, black children stand by their school desks to proclaim, "I am Malcolm X." The camera then shows us Nelson Mandela standing by a blackboard in a teaching capacity. This is as close as Lee ever comes to indicating where Malcolm was heading politically and what the reactions of African-Americans should be. But Mandela is evoked as a celebrity, a cultural icon not unlike a pop star. In reality, of course, Mandela is an African socialist who has led a mostly black nationalist movement with socialist and liberal allies. Among his strategies has been the use of the United Nations and world public opinion to advance his cause. Such a political perspective is never posed in Malcolm X. For those African-Americans who want to identify with Malcolm, there is only the story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X. Withheld is how Malcolm X was defining El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. That new identity does not fit neatly on a baseball cap, and it does not play well in Peoria.