Carmichael Blasts Lee on ‘Malcolm’

Former Black Panther Stokely Carmichael hit out at filmmaker Spike Lee and rained a barrage of abuse on other leading African-Americans in an interview to be published next week.

Carmichael’s remarks showed that, after 24 years in Guinea, he is still as bitter a critic of the United States as he was when spearheading the black power movement in the 1960s. And his targets are as likely to be black as white.

Speaking at his home in a modest Conakry suburb, the 51-year-old revolutionary sharply criticized Lee, the black film director whose most recent film charts the life of murdered 1960s black activist Malcolm X.

“Spike Lee is incapable of making a film about Malcolm X,” Carmichael said in an interview with the Paris African weekly Jeune Afrique. The text was made available to Reuters on Wednesday.

“Spike Lee is a petit bourgeois who took the choice of selling his people for a fistful of dollars. Malcolm X was a revolutionary,” he said.

“Can you imagine for one minute Hollywood giving Malcolm X a hand? You might as well ask Zionists to make a film about (Palestinian leader Yasser) Arafat.”

Trinidad-born Carmichael, who broke with the Black Panthers in 1967 and went to Africa to promote revolution, is now known as Kwame Toure in honor of former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah and deposed Guinean leader Sekou Toure.