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Martin
Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X
Martin
Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had very different views on how blacks should
go about gaining equality.King believed
that blacks should be integrated into society, whereas Malcolm X believed
that blacks should be separate, but equal, maybe even superior.Both
King and Malcolm X were emotional speakers and writers.They
both knew what to say to mobilize the masses, and both gave their lives
to further the cause of Civil Rights.Even
though both leaders had different methods of achieving their goals, they
both had a profound effect upon blacks in the United States.
Martin
Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929, where
he lived with his entire family.His
father was Martin Luther King Sr., and his mother was Alberta Williams
King.King was their first son, and
the second child.He would end up
being one of three children.King
was very smart, skipping both the ninth and the twelfth grades. In
his elementary school days, King attended the local segregated public schools.He
went to church at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he eventually became the
co-pastor with his father.His ordination
was in February 1948, after which he became assistant pastor with his father.He
attended Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University
(where he got his Ph.D. from on June 5, 1955).On
June 18, 1953, King married Coretta Scott, and they would have four children
together.In 1955, after King received
his Ph. D., he became the pastor of Montgomery Alabama’s Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church from September 1954 until November 1959.On
December 5, 1955, he was named as the President of the Montgomery Improvement
Association.This was the start of
his public career.He initiated
the boycott of the bus company, and was almost convicted on charges of
conspiracy because of the bus boycott.King
was arrested 30 times because of his civil disobedience methods.Because
of this boycott, buses became integrated.In
1957, King started the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.On
August 18, 1963, he was involved in the March on Washington where he gave
his “I Have a Dream” speech.In December
1963, King was named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”, and in 1964,
he was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.J
Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI thought that King was dangerous, because
in 1965, he started the march from Selma to Montgomery.On
April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee while speaking
about a local sanitation workers’ strike.James
Earl Ray was convicted of the murder, but there is still a lot of controversy
surrounding King’s murder (http://windowsmedia.com/mg/artistprofile?name=MartinLutherKingJr;
http://martinlutherking.8m.com/).
Martin
Luther King Jr is best known for his non-violent means of protest; however,
he did not always believe in these methods.According
to Fairclough’s book, To Redeem the Soul of America: The SCLC and Martin
Luther King Jr., “King initially viewed direct action as a means of
persuasion, a way of convincing Southern whites of the moral injustice
of segregation and discrimination.After
the failure of the SCLC’s protests in Albany, Georgia in 1961-2, however,
King abandoned this view as unrealistic, adopting a strategy of '‘nonviolent
coercion'’Thereafter, Garrow argues,
instead of trying to persuade their adversaries of the rightness of their
goals, King and the SCLC sought to put pressure on the federal government
by staging dramatic confrontations that publicized segregationist violence”
(Fairclough 51-2).King “explicitly
rejected the notion that blacks-or any other oppressed group-could overcome
their subjugation through ethical appeals and rational argument: they also
needed an effective means of pressure” (Fairclough 52).King
realized that nonviolent methods were not completely successful on their
own; there had to be a way to get people to change.According
to Fairclough, “For King, nonviolence was an ethical imperative, a total
way of life, and his commitment to it was absolute and consistent.Moreover,
he did sometimes imply that nonviolent protests worked partly through persuasion,
by awakening ‘a sense of moral shame in the opponent’.The
nonviolent resister, he explained, touched the heart and conscience of
his adversary, converging an oppressor into a friend” (Fairclough 52).King
did not want segregation, but he wanted integration.According
to Fairclough, “King asserted that blacks could convert their white oppressors
into friends if they accompanied their protests with redemptive love” (Fairclough
26).This philosophy reinforced
King’s Christian beliefs and values.However,
many people believed that more than love was needed.King
believed that “nonviolent resistance generated unity, dynamism, and power”
(Fairclough 25).So, it was quite
evident that King was opposed to the Vietnam War (Hampton, Fayer 450).
King
had an elegant and emotional way of appealing to his audience.According
to Fairclough, “King eschewed rhetorical excess but nonetheless aroused
the emotions of his audience.His
rich, deep voice suggested intimacy and warmth; it was calming and reassuring.He
began his speeches slowly, pronouncing each word clearly and carefully
in an effort to capture and hold the attention of his listeners.Almost
imperceptibly, as he neared his peroration, the words came more quickly,
the pitch and volume rose, and through repetition of a single phrase or
question he built up to a powerful climax” (Fairclough 27).King
always knew hot to appeal to his audience; he was able to tell them what
they needed to hear to act.
Other
than speaking, King’s writings were also very powerful.Martin
Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was written in 1963 while
he was imprisoned for marching without a permit.This
letter was written in response to a letter King received from a white clergyman
condemning King’s actions as being too violent.According
to Fairclough, “King set out to systematically demolish the various objections
to nonviolent direct action, and to justify his own particular decision
to violate a court order” (Fairclough 124).The
white clergyman claimed that King was creating a white backlash in which
whites would become more hostile toward blacks because they viewed them
as being too dangerous.King responded
to these accusations by saying that people have a moral duty to break unjust
laws.King believed that he was
caught between two extremes: one being the Negro who is drained of self-respect
and has accepted segregation, and the other more educated middle class
who had more or less become insensitive to the masses.White
moderates were telling King that he had to take things slowly.King
responded by saying that blacks have waited 300 years for equality, and
they could not wait any longer.King,
unlike Malcolm X, believed that blacks should integrate into society.Every
group except African-Americans has integrated into Americansociety.
Malcolm
Little was born on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska.His
mother, Louis Norton Little, was a homemaker.His
father, Earl Little was a Baptist minister and a black nationalist.He
followed Marcus Garvey from the United Negro Improvement Association.Malcolm
was one of eight children.His father’s
activism made them move frequently because they were constantly getting
death threats.In 1931, his father
was murdered. Malcolm was
very smart, but when he said that he wanted to be a lawyer and his mother
said no, he lost interest in school. A few years later, his mother had
a nervous breakdown, and was committed.The
children were taken away and put in different foster homes and orphanages.Malcolm
went to a foster home, and then to reform school because of his poor behavior.He
dropped out of school in 1940 at 15 years old.He
moved to Boston to live with his half sister, and then moved to Harlem,
New York where he got into a life of crime.He
got involved in narcotics, prostitution, and gambling.He
then moved back to Boston, and in 1946 was arrested and convicted of burglary.He
was sentenced to jail for several years.In
that time, he furthered his education by studying the Nation of Islam. Because
he believed that Little was his slave name, Malcolm changed his last name
to X, symbolizing his lost tribe name.He
became a minister, and the national spokesman for the Nation of Islam.He
moved to Detroit to run a church.On
January 14 1958, he married Betty Sanders and they had six daughters together.Because
he was very outspoken, the FBI began to follow his actions.A
few years after joining the Black Muslims, Malcolm discovered that Muhammad
was with many women from the Nation of Islam.This
went against their principles, so Malcolm felt betrayed. On
March 8, 1964, after Malcolm was silenced by Mohammed for talking negatively
about JFK after his assassination, he broke with the Nation of Islam.He
then went on to found the Muslim Mosque Inc.After
this, he went on a journey to Mecca, Saudi Arabia.He
changed his name to El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
Upon
returning, Malcolm was a new man.He
no longer preached only to blacks, but to all races.He
advocated racial solidarity, and wanted to unite all people who suffered
because of racism.He even encouraged
blacks to vote.The FBI then warned
Malcolm that he was marked for assassination.On
February 21, 1965, at a speaking engagement for the OAAU in Manhattan’s
Audubon Ballroom in New York City, three gunmen shot Malcolm 15 times.The
killers were: Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson.It
is believed that two out of three of the gunmen were members of the Nation
of Islam and wanted Malcolm dead because he was too outspoken and became
a threat (http://encarta.msn.com; www.geosities.com/Athens/Troy/2025/frames.html;
http://www.uni-jena.de/~qab/malcolm.html; www.cmgww.com/historic/malcolm/index.html).
Malcolm
X had a different set of beliefs that Martin Luther King Jr.Malcolm
X believed that nonviolent methods were not going to make the world aware
of the struggle that blacks faced.Some
people, though, believed that Malcolm X’s vision was far too violent and
extreme.According to Hampton and
Fayer, “For some, Malcolm would be the uncompromising teller of unpleasant
truths, an incorruptible symbol of black pride, and self-reliance, and
a staunch advocate of self-defense.For
others, he was a hate-mongering black racist, a harbinger of racial conflict
and violence.But no matter how he
was perceived, whether hated or loved, in the early 1960’s in America,
he was a presence haunting the often violent national argument over race”
(Hampton, Fayer 241-2).Malcolm X’s
advocacy of violence landed him in trouble, and in 1946, he was sentenced
to ten years in jail.It was there
that he converted to the Nation of Islam, or the Black Muslims, headed
by Elijah Mohammed.According to
Hampton and Fayer, “Intense and single-minded, he began preaching the gospel
of the Nation with an incandescent and bitter eloquence….It was in part
a doctrine of theological fundamentalism, antiwhite mythology, and total
racial separation as a means to black redemption” (Hampton, Fayer 243).Black
Muslims did advocate violence, but only as a means of self-defense.Malcolm
advocated an independent black state, and he believed that all whites were
devils.He believed that there was
a great war coming between blacks and whites, and that whites would be
destroyed.
Malcolm
X had a very different idea than King about how to initiate changes.Malcolm
X wanted blacks to control the neighborhood economies.He
also wanted the UN to get involved in the struggle against whites.The
UN believes in equality, so they should help blacks achieve this goal.Blacks
should also educate themselves about politics.Unlike
King, Malcolm X believed that blacks should be separate from whites.Whites
only dragged blacks down and made them inferior.Blacks
should remove the evils that are in society and purify themselves.Moral
vices divide blacks against themselves, and weaken them.Malcolm
X wanted blacks to have as much power as whites; they would just have to
be separate and equal.Malcolm believed
that blacks in America should unite with blacks around the world against
the struggle against whites.Malcolm
X even went so far as to say that blacks have never been part of the American
society.In his essay “The Ballot
of the Bullet”, Malcolm X believed that it was time for blacks to take
action either through voting or violence.Voting,
he said was the more practical of the two because blacks constituted a
voting bloc.However, he was ready
to use violence if necessary.
Even
though King and Malcolm X had different ideas about how to change society,
they both affected people in different ways and helped to advance the black
cause before their assassinations.Malcolm
X appealed to the urban and rural poor, whereas King appealed to the middle
class.According to Hampton and
Fayer, “On the question of race, Malcolm and King came to symbolize the
choices facing black and white America.On
the one side was King’s forbearant example and integrationist vision.On
the other was the vision of the Nation of Islam, in which the white man
was not a brother subject to healing force of love and redemptive suffering.He
was instead a blue-eyed devil, the militant creation of a mad experiment,
with whom integration was unthinkable.For
the nation, nonviolence would succeed, and acceptance of suffering masochistic
folly (Hampton, Fayer 243).Both
King and Malcolm X were killed for their beliefs, but they will not be
forgotten.
Bibliography
Ankeny,
Jason.Martin
Luther King Jr. Website.<http://windowsmedia.com/mg/artistprofile.asp?name=martin%20luther%20king%2jr>.
Boese,
Alexander.Malcolm
X Website.<http://www.uni-jena.de/~qab/malcolm.html>.
Fairclough,
Adam.The Soul of America: the
SCLC and Martin Luther King Jr.Athens:
University of Georgia Press.1987.
Finkleman,
Paul.“Malcolm X”.Microsoft
Encarta Online Encyclopedia.2001.<http://encarta.msn.com>.
Hampton,
Henry; Fayer, Steve.Voices of
Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950’s Through
the 1980’s.New York: Bantam
Books.1990.
Malcolm
X Website.<http://www.cmgww.com/historic/malcolm/index.html>.
Malcolm
X Website.<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/2025/frames.html>.
Martin
Luther King Jr. Website.<http://martinlutherking.8m.com/>.