There's a hidden history. You see, Malcolm X and [Alex ] Haley collaborated to produce a magnificent narrative about the life of Malcolm X, but the two men had very different motives in coming together.

I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by Black America in the 20th century.

I'm not an attorney or a person who does intellectual property .

I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm X came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective.

Most people who read the autobiography perceive the narrative as a story that now millions of people know, and it was - it's a story of human transformation, the powerful epiphany, Malcolm's X journey to Mecca, his renunciation of the Nation of Islam's racial separatism, his embrace of universal humanity, of humanism that was articulated through Sunni Islam. Well, that's the story everybody knows.

[Alex Haley] objective was to illustrate that the racial separatism of the N.O.I. was a kind of pathological or a kind of - it was the logical culmination of separatism and racial isolationism and exclusion.

Malcolm X already envisioning the N.O.I. playing a role cooperatively with integrationist organizations.