COVER STORY : ‘By Any Means Necessary’--Lee Adopts Motto of Malcolm X

If Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” created crevasses in its audiences, the director’s new film, “Malcolm X,” is likely to open up canyons.

Lee, like many African-American artists of his generation, puts Malcolm X--the onetime Malcolm Little, who was known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Al-Sabban at his death--in a special category. Malcolm’s quote, “By any means necessary” (the “means” needed to end racial injustice) adorns all of Spike Lee’s productions, followed by the softeningly humorous “Ya Dig? Sho Nuff!”

Malcolm X galvanized the nation around racial issues back in the 1960s, and Lee drives similar ideas to the fore in his movies: especially ones involving Afro-American self-help and unity. Disunity is a subject Lee depicts, in one form or another, over and over: typically, dividing his characters into groups and setting them into futile and ridiculous conflicts.

“And,” Lee insists, “it will be a question I’ll keep on dealing with until . . . black people become more unified. ‘Wake up’: In every single movie I’ve done, those words have been uttered.”

That same phrase, not coincidentally, recurs frequently throughout the posthumous Grove Press speech collection, “Malcolm Speaks.”

Just as Lee’s capacity to rattle critics helps fuel the furor around him, Malcolm X’s capacity to scare white America initially lifted him to fame. From July, 1959, when Mike Wallace’s five-part KNET TV program, “The Hate That Hate Produced,” introduced Malcolm and the Muslims to the public, right up to his 1965 assassination, he was the fieriest of Afro-American spokesmen.

Back then, he seemed the crystallization of a white racist’s worst nightmare--which, partially, is what he wanted to seem. “Malcolm was many different people,” Lee says. “And we’re gonna see the evolution of those people in this film.”

One of those Malcolms was a ferocious iconoclast: unique in his outspoken contempt for the very goal, integration into mainstream American society, that fellow black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. fought for. In the beginning, in speech after speech, Malcolm excoriated white people as devils, castigated American society and institutions as racist, reviled other religions and political groups, and even shocked audiences by irreverent reactions to the John F. Kennedy assassination.

The Malcolm of fame’s first flush was an intransigent racial separatist; indeed, he was sent by Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad as an emissary to the Ku Klux Klan. But, later on, according to biographer Bruce Perry, Malcolm was so guilt-ridden about some of “what he had preached” (including tales of the creation of the evil white race by mad scientist Mr. Yacub) “that he had to consult a psychiatrist.”

Malcolm’s public racial views changed dramatically after his split with Elijah Muhammad and 1964 visit to Mecca. And, with the posthumous publication of his speeches, and the “Autobiography,” assembled and edited by Alex (“Roots”) Haley, his image began to change as well.

His speeches, full of streetwise humor and salty scorn, remain corrosive and unfiltered looks at the misery and anger of much African-American experience. And Haley’s book, the cornerstone of Malcolm’s legend, is the mesmerizing story of a good, but spiritually and culturally estranged man, passing through a deprived youth and various kinds of hell and imprisonment, to a final tragic deliverance.

It’s a hair-raising story. But, for Lee, it’s also an inspirational one: the story of a man reclaimed, always willing to grow and change. “It’s a model of what one man can do,” Lee says. “Malcolm raised himself from the depths. He made himself, particularly for Afro-Americans, an inspiration. . . . I think he was constantly in search of the truth. And if he woke up and found that the person he was at that particular moment was uncomfortable or lacking, he went on to change himself for the better.”

“I think Malcolm really set a program out there,” Lee says. “Of education, unity, self-employment, pan-Africanism, that, if we’d follow, we’d be in a lot better state than we are at present.”

Biographer Perry suggests that Malcolm’s “violent” image was always ambiguous. According to prison-mate Malcolm Jarvis (one of several prototypes for Spike Lee’s role as “Shorty”), Malcolm X resembled one of his favorite fictional characters: the wily Fox in Aesop’s Fables, who wins by brains rather than force. Malcolm, Perry theorizes, was trying, all his life, to resolve internal conflicts: about bravery, manhood, rage at injustice, the white ancestors who gave him his red hair.

Spike Lee has a different theory. “I discovered that Malcolm was always in search of a father figure. Shorty, West Indian Archie, Baines (another composite figure), the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”

And when his last father figure rejected him? “He was devastated. Then he arrives at some final truths. No longer does he think all white people are devils.” And before that? “He believed everything he said, everything Elijah Muhammad said. . . . Because every bad thing he talked about had happened to him or his family, or black people he knew.”

The well-read Malcolm X mastered the discourse of both blacks and whites. Similarly, Spike Lee has mastered a form of discourse, moviemaking, that, in America, has been almost exclusively the province of whites.

Interestingly, Malcolm X, in his early Harlem years, was a movie fan, too. His particular favorites included “Casablanca” and Humphrey Bogart. And Malcolm knew white pop culture intimately. Ironically, one of his most famous quotes about black estrangement from American values--”We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us!” (which Denzel Washington preaches in Lee’s movie)--is almost a direct lift from Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” a song ballroom whiz Malcolm would have heard repeatedly through the ‘40s.

Lee, of course, is even more well-versed in the multi-culture of America. His own favorite historical movies include “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Lust for Life” and Gordon Parks’ “Leadbelly.” And his all-time favorite moviemakers include Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Elia Kazan and Billy Wilder--all of whom have excelled at showing the contemporary relevance of real or historical figures.

So, it’s not surprising that he wants to use Malcolm’s story to illuminate our times. “I want to show that a lot of the stuff--almost all the stuff--(Malcolm X) talked about then, 30 years ago--is still happening today. And that, for the most part, nothing has changed: that the injustices he talked about still have to be fought today.”