Malcolm X

Malcolm X was a very informative biopic about Malcolm X, a civil rights leader who was killed while advocating for racial equality at a rally. This biopic not only caught my attention but kept it. While watching this movie, I made connections between it and a documentary I'd just seen called I Am Not Your Negro. In this documentary, I was able to hear about James Baldwin's accounts of his friendship with Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders. Through this I was able to better understand Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement as a whole.

Many people viewed him as an extremist, but through this movie and I Am Not Your Negro I saw that, though he started out that way, towards the end of his life he changed his views. In fact, he even started his own church after taking a trip to Mecca. While there, he learned that Muslims weren't just Arabs, Africans and Middle Eastern people, but could be of any race. I was also taught by history books and other movies that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King didn't get along due to their opposing views on how to create change. However, James Baldwin's accounts in I Am Not Your Negro taught me that towards the ends of their lives, around the time Malcolm X changed his views, he and Martin Luther King had become friends. Baldwin even went on to write that Malcolm X was one of the people Martin Luther King saw on the mountain top.

This movie opened my eyes to how skewed American history is. All my life I was taught that Malcolm X was violent. While yes, he encouraged making change "By any means necessary", he wasn't inherently violent. Also, while I knew Malcolm X wasn't born Muslim, I didn't know anything about his life before being a Civil Rights leader. I didn't know he had siblings or that his father was a pastor, I knew nothing about the criminal history that put him in jail for him to change the course of his life. Malcolm X was a man who saw injustice in his world and set out to change it. In the words of James Baldwin, "Some people are born to lead, to be on the front lines, and to give their lives for the cause. Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar were those people. Others were born to live on and tell the story. I will tell the story." Now the question is, will you give your life to the cause or tell the story?