Hello, fellow movie fans. I'm Lily Percy and I'll be your guide this week as I talk with activist and poet Andrea Jenkins about the movie that changed her life, Spike Lee's Malcolm X.

If you haven't seen it, don't worry, we're going to give you all the details you'll need to follow along.

Spike Lee's Malcolm X was decades in the making.

When the book first came out of the autobiography of Malcolm X, James Baldwin actually wrote the first version of the screenplay, and that was in the 1960s when he first tried to adapt it

into a movie.

Spike Lee made this happen in the early 90s,

and the movie that he tells is a very different story

than the one we usually hear about Malcolm X.

It's Malcolm as a human being,

a man who did the thing that none of us do,

which has changed our minds in public,

over and over and over again,

illuminating the very distinct chapters of Malcolm X's life.

I took my master's degree in prison over the course of six and a half years. In fact, my old

burglary hangout is just outside this campus.

I lived like an animal.

I stole.

I used drugs.

Had it not been for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,

I'd have surely been in an insane asylum or dead,

or possibly even the murderer of one of you. So what is Mr.

Muhammad trying to do? He's trying to get us on God's side so that God will be on our side

...