(RNS) — More than five decades after he was gunned down at age 39 in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in an apparent effort to silence him, Malcolm X has retained his voice in American culture. In an era of “Muslim bans” and the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, as he was called at his death in February of 1965, remains an influential figure in pop culture, political activism and among American Muslims.
The Muslim minister and activist’s most recent flare into public consciousness comes with the film “One Night in Miami,” in which Muhammad Ali, R&B singer Sam Cooke, NFL star Jim Brown and Malcolm X (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) engage in an imagined all-night hang. A biography released last year, “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X,” presents 30 years of deep research by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Les Payne and his daughter Tamara Payne, who finished the book after her father died in 2018.