A Minister's Break With the Man Who Ordained Him

The film's religious arc follows a documented conversion, break and second conversion. Malcolm Little was incarcerated in Massachusetts in the late 1940s on burglary charges, and it was in prison that his brother introduced him by letter to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. He emerged in 1952 as Malcolm X, rose quickly as a minister and the Nation's most visible spokesman, and built its Temple Number Seven in Harlem into one of the movement's largest congregations over the following decade.

The break came from within. Malcolm learned that Elijah Muhammad, whom he had presented publicly as a model of moral discipline, had fathered children with several of his own secretaries, private conduct the Nation's own teaching held its members to a stricter account than that. Silenced by the Nation after remarks about President Kennedy's assassination, Malcolm formally left in 1964 and undertook the hajj to Mecca. There he prayed alongside Muslims of every race, an experience he described as reordering his understanding of Islam entirely, and returned as El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, a Sunni Muslim advocating a less racially separatist politics than the Nation had taught him. He was assassinated in Manhattan on February 21, 1965, by gunmen with ties to the Nation of Islam he had left less than a year before.