Brother Minister: The Assassination Of Malcolm X is a long, earnest, complex documentary that tries to set the record straight on 30 years of speculation and lies.
Narrated by Roscoe Lee Browne, directed by Jack Baxter and co-written by Baxter and Jefri Aalmuhammed (who was a consultant on Spike Lee's Malcolm X), Brother Minister is a seven-part, exhaustive inquiry into the very tangled web surrounding the 1965 assassination of black activist Malcolm X.
The highly controversial documentary implicates just about everyone you can think of, starting with black leader Louis Farrakhan and moving on to the FBI, the CIA, the New York police, the Nation of Islam and its founder, Elijah Muhammad (the man whose sexual dalliances and eight illegitimate children were exposed by Malcolm X), members of the FOI - the Nation's security force - various bodyguards, and maybe even, in some strange martyrdom thing, Malcolm X himself.
This film names names. According to Brother Minister (and common sense), the death of Malcolm X involves massive cover-up. Innocent men were jailed for his death; the one man known to have been a shooter named his four accomplices in 1978 but none of those men has ever been arrested.
Brother Minister unfolds through archival footage and stills, old newsreels of the aftermath of the assassination, a re-creation of the killing, TV news clips and many, many interviews with Malcolm X's friends and associates. These include - among others - Dr. John Henrik Clarke, who first helped Malcolm X with historical research; assassination witness Robert Higgins; author Baba Zak A. Kondo; lawyer William Kunstler, and convicted killer Thomas 15X Johnson, who served 23 years despite being innocent of Malcolm X's assassination.
To some extent, Brother Minister puts back in context some of Malcolm X's more incendiary statements.
