Never cared much for Malcom X.
He said some tough truths and had a few catchy lines, but at the end of the day, he fell short of the kind of person I would want helping lead my people in the fight for equality. He decided to change his ways far too late and even then, he was still a racist among other things. And before that, was at many times a poster boy for what amounts to a black supremacist cult that perverts Islam for a political agenda -- I was just reading up on the Nation Islam and Five Percent Nation last week for the first time in a while, absolutely disgusting. I can't respect that, I have a hard time respecting....anything about him except that he put himself out there in time like that, braving great danger.
Too many people just focus on his one liners like the Plymouth rock stuff and the knife quote instead of the racist, black supremacist bull**** he championed directly and indirectly with his words and actions. I can understand his anger and that of other black militant wings, the Black Panthers and even the Black Liberation Army, but after that, it's just ****ing nonsense and blatant racism tied in with lame buzzwords like anti-imperialist and even, for God knows what reason, anti-capitalist. Malcom kind of helped validate these more problematic, militant elements to act on instinct rather than use their head. And he slurped up the ultra-leftist drivel like sweet tea, that doesn't help.
Still, Malcom X with Denzel Washington and directed by Spike Lee is the best biopic to this day and Malcom himself left his imprint on modern history, for better or for worse.
Anyway, I voted "negative." He was a negative figure, but he was a necessary figure. Malcom literally embodied the anger of Black America, a very, very, very justified fury. It was going to happen, it had to happen, it was meant to happen.
It's funny, as a kid, I thought he just played too much into more militant approaches to fighting for equality and change, then you learn what he actually believed for most of his adult life after his conversion to Islam, or what he believed to be Islam, and you just want to throw up.
Still, I think if he hadn't been murdered by the Nation of Islam and given some years to think things over, he may have reformed and left the last vestiges of his racist ways. He would have done great things then, I think, provided a reformation came. But, what's done is done.