When Jesse Hagopian first encountered Malcolm X, it wasn’t in a textbook or classroom lecture. It was through Spike Lee’s iconic 1992 film. 

“I realized I needed to learn more,” Hagopian, educator and director of the Teaching for Black Lives campaign at the Zinn Education Project, tells Word In Black. “Reading his autobiography in college was transformative, like it has been for so many. But it also left me feeling betrayed. Why hadn’t I learned about Malcolm in school?”

Decades later, that betrayal persists for millions of Black students in K-12 public schools nationwide. Despite Malcolm X being one of the most influential figures in American history, his story is still largely missing, or misrepresented, in K-12 education. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, just 13 states explicitly mention Malcolm X in their K-12 social studies standards, compared to 37 states that mandate teaching about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

“When young Black students don’t learn about Malcolm X,” Hagopian says, “they lose the opportunity to understand systemic oppression and their own power to challenge it. Malcolm’s brilliance was that he spoke plainly about injustice. He named it. And he made it clear that another world was possible.”

When Malcolm does appear, he’s reduced to King’s “angry” counterpart. Teachers instruct students to compare and contrast the two. The standard classroom narrative goes like this: King was peaceful, and Malcolm was violent. King had a hopeful dream about integration, while Malcolm hated white people. And that’s been the case for decades.

A 1992 opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson noted that “Little is taught regarding Malcolm X and the limited amount said usually portrays him as Dr. King’s violent alternative who marginalized whites while contributing little to the movement’s success as a whole.”

“Failing to teach Malcolm X isn’t just a curricular oversight; it’s a deliberate act of erasure that robs Black students of their rightful legacy.”

Hagopian says this approach not only flattens Malcolm’s legacy but also distorts both leaders’ contributions. “In far too many classrooms, Malcolm is portrayed as the angry counterpart to Dr. King,” he explains. They have to sanitize King — paint him as passive — and flatten Malcolm X into a caricature of violence and confrontation. They erase the fact that by the end of their lives, both leaders were calling for a multiracial movement against capitalism and systemic racism.”

The impact of ignoring or misrepresenting a figure like Malcolm X reflects an overall unwillingness of the nation’s schools to teach the truth about U.S. history. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, show that only 12% of U.S. high school seniors are proficient in U.S. history. And, according to Education Week’s Research Center, 65% of teachers say their state has no Black history requirement at all — meaning students often leave school with a sanitized view of the Civil Rights Movement, limited to only a few familiar figures, while truth-telling voices like Malcolm are sidelined or erased altogether.

Hagopian says the erasure isn’t accidental and argues that it’s a direct response to the power Malcolm’s ideas hold today. “They know that if students learn about him, they’ll see the connections between racism, capitalism, and imperialism,” he says. “They’ll be inspired to organize. And that terrifies those who want to maintain the status quo.”

Despite a wave of “divisive concepts” bans and anti-CRT laws — what Hagopian refers to as “truth crime laws” — educators across the country are finding ways to teach Malcolm X’s full legacy. Through the Teaching for Black Lives campaign, Hagopian and others support over 100 study groups for educators annually, reaching thousands of students even in states like Florida, Texas and Tennessee, where Black history is the most under attack.

Teaching Malcolm X, Hagopian says, doesn’t have to be complicated. His classroom suggestions include assigning “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” showing clips of his speeches, such as his powerful 1964 Oxford Union debate, and using new resources like Ibram X. Kendi’s forthcoming youth biography, “Malcolm Lives.”

In the book, Kendi writes about the parallels between Malcolm X’s activism against police brutality and how it “inspired people who spoke out against the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Tyre Nichols.” It also “inspired those three Black women who first said: BLACK LIVES MATTER,” he notes. 

“Malcolm has the ability to teach every young reader that no matter the challenges that they’re facing, the adversity that they’re facing in this moment, they have the potential and the capacity to become a great historical figure like Malcolm X,” Kendi recently told the Los Angeles Times. “To me, that’s one of the most interesting aspects of his story. With everything he endured as a young person, he still was able to navigate everything and become this pivotal and influential figure.”

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