SOURCE: "Malcolm X Across the Genres," in American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 2, April, 1993, pp. 432-39.

In the following essay, Painter examines (he facts and events involved in the story of Malcolm X's life as they are presented in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and two films adapted from that book, both entitled Malcolm X.

The historian in me distrusted a dramatic early scene in Spike Lee's Malcolm X that is set in Omaha. The Ku Klux Klan comes pounding up to the Little family's house on horseback. Initially, the scene seems menacingly authentic—hooded white supremacy in its most recognizable guise bent on terrorizing a helpless black family—but as soon as one recalls that this is supposed to be Omaha, Nebraska, in the 1920s, the sense of realism breaks down.

I assumed this to be yet another employment of the iconography of southern white supremacy, which Americans...