make a major film about Malcolm X reflects an upsurge of interest that was already taking hold. By 1992, for example, sales of the Autobiography of Malcolm X had increased 300 percent over their 1989 level (Lord and Thornton, 1992, p. 78).
Why has Malcolm X achieved such posthumous standing? A facile explanation would be that, far more than, say, Martin Luther King, he symbolizes a prevalent attitude of black rage and frustration 30 years after the Civil Rights era. There is an element of truth in this. In the 1960s, Malcolm X's image was that of a man who frightened whites rather than reaching out to them. As early as 1959, when he first came to the widespread notice of white America, it was in the context of a presentation on "black racism" by Mike Wallace of CBS News (Lord and Thornton, 1992, p. 76). Yet the Black Panthers, who were even more militant in their day, have been largely forgotten.
The key element in the resurgent interest in Malcolm X may be a sense that he represented not only black anger, but also, and even more crucially, the search for black self-empowerment. The nature of this struggle can best be expressed in Malcolm X's own words, in his Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), co-written with Alex Haley. In the late 1940s, Malcolm Little (his birth name) was in prison, convicted for a string of burglaries in 1945 and 1946 (Perry, 1991, pp. 94-99).
Malcolm considered himself streetwise, and was so regarded by friends and fellow prisoners, but he discovered that there was a kind of knowledge he had never known existed. He attempted to read books, but found them nearly incomprehensible. One day he checked a dictionary out of the prison library, and spent the rest of that day copying a page out of it. In a celebrated passage, he describes his reaction when he reviewed his effort the following morning:
I'd written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I...