Malcolm X and Martin Luther King: Compared and Contrasted.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King: Compared and Contrasted.
Two black males living in America at a time when black people were oppressed and considered second class citizens, neither Martin Luther King nor Malcolm X lived to see their dreams realised. Although their goals were the same their methods were drastically different. "I have a dream" was a speech delivered by Martin Luther King on the 28 August 1963, "The Ballot or the Bullet" was a passionate speech put forward by Malcolm X on the 12 April 1964. Both speeches were given within a year of each other and clearly convey a different message, a message however which worked towards the same goal of full civil rights for black Americans.
Their backgrounds were in some ways very similar but at times were very different. Both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were born into large black families and both came to maturity in the middle of the twentieth century. The similarities do not end here as both their fathers were preachers and civil rights activists who influenced their sons greatly.
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little, the son of a Preacher from Georgia who had moved to Omaha, Nebraska in 1923 with his three small children. In 1924 Malcolm's mother (who was pregnant with Malcolm) was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan after Earl Little had stirred up trouble within the black community, with the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) preaching his idea "back to Africa". In 1926 the Little family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta on 15 January 1929 six years after Malcolm Little. He was the grandson of the Rev. A.D Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church and a founder of Atlanta's NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) chapter, and the son of Martin Luther King, Sr who succeeded Williams as Ebenezer's pastor. King's roots were in the African-American Baptist church. Compared to Malcolm X's childhood Martin Luther King's childhood seems quite stable and normal and he probably grew up without fear of persecution. This is unlike Malcolm X whose home was burnt to the ground when he was five years old and whose father was run over by a street car and killed when he was only eight years old. It was rumoured that the driver was a member of the Black Legion, a local white supremacist group. This must have fired both Malcolm X's animosity towards white people and his desire to see black people treated fairly.
The main difference in their education was that King attended College and then went on to get a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology in 1955 at Boston University where he studied Mahatma Gandhi's "non-violent protest" strategy for social change. He then accepted the Pastorate at his father's church, Dexter Avenue Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.
King's upbringing contrasted dramatically with Malcolm X's whose mother was declared insane while he was still young and was committed to the state mental hospital at Kalamazoo where she remained for the next 26 years. That same year aged fourteen he confided to his favourite teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer. Malcolm was told "that's no realistic goal for a nigger."(Source 1) It was not surprising when Malcolm Little then dropped out of school and became a chauffeur and houseman for Dr. Gertrude Sullivan. During this time he was placed in a juvenile home and various foster homes. In 1941 he went to live with his paternal half sister Mrs Ella Collins and held various jobs including shoe shining and dish washing. Malcolm became involved with Boston's underworld fringe and eventually became a "hustler" and pushed dope; he took on a new name, "Big Red" (Source 1). This troubled childhood may be the basis for his repulsion for white supremacists and he developed the view that black people should overcome them. This was a contributing factor to why he changed his faith from the Christian religion to the Muslim religion as many white supremacist groups were based in Christian communities.
Up to a point both King and Malcolm X seem to have been brought up on the same set of standards, as King and Malcolm X's fathers held similar roles in society as preachers. However, there was major difference for although Earl Little was a preacher he was a poor man travelling from town to town whereas Martin Luther King Sr. was more middle class, had a fixed parish and so could afford to send his son to high school, college and university. It was the nature and suddenness of his father's death and his mother's subsequent decline ...
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Up to a point both King and Malcolm X seem to have been brought up on the same set of standards, as King and Malcolm X's fathers held similar roles in society as preachers. However, there was major difference for although Earl Little was a preacher he was a poor man travelling from town to town whereas Martin Luther King Sr. was more middle class, had a fixed parish and so could afford to send his son to high school, college and university. It was the nature and suddenness of his father's death and his mother's subsequent decline into insanity that truly affected Malcolm's pre adult years and turned him into the man he was later to become.
Further evidence that Earl Little's death affected Malcolm is seen in September 1943 when the US army found Malcolm "mentally disqualified for military service" (Source 1), because of psychopathic personality inadequacies, sexual perversion, psychiatric rejection, and he was classified 4F meaning unfit for duty. By the age of twenty, at which age Martin Luther King was working hard at college, Malcolm X had become one of the many disaffected black youths in American society seemingly without hope of advancement.
In 1946 Malcolm's brother Reginald Little introduced him to the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. Drawn to the religious group's racial doctrines, which categorized whites as "devils", he began reading extensively about world history and politics, particularly concerning African slavery and the oppression of black people in America. After he was paroled from prison in August 1952, he became Minister Malcolm X in the Islamic church, using the surname X to replace the African name that had been taken from his slave ancestors.
Within eight years, by 1954, Malcolm had become minister of New York Temple No. 7, and in 1957 he became the NOI national representative, a position of influence second only to that of Elijah Muhammad. He gained these positions not through his academic achievements but through his passion and ability in public speaking. In these early speeches, Malcolm X did not confine himself to religion. He used his position as a preacher to urge black people to separate from white people and win their freedom "by any means necessary." (Source 1)
After similar beginnings as sons of preachers, Malcolm X and King's lives during adolescence and young adulthood went off in different directions spiritually. They started to converge again in the mid nineteen fifties when they began to fulfil similar roles as preachers of respectively the Islamic and Christian churches.
In December 1955, a year after Malcolm X moved to New York, there came the spark that would ignite and boost Martin Luther King's reputation as a black rights activist. Although still a young man King was elected president of the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association. He was looking for a cause to highlight the situation of black people in southern America. A civil rights activist, Rosa Parks, refused to comply with Montgomery's segregation policy on buses; she said later "I was not tired physically, but tired of giving in" (Source 2). After she was arrested, King mobilised black residents to launch a bus boycott. This bus boycott lasted throughout 1956 and King gained national fame for his role in this operation. While Malcolm X was slowly climbing the ladder to fame in civil rights, Martin Luther King seems to have taken the elevator to prominence. In December 1956 the Supreme courts declared that Alabama's segregation laws were unconstitutional and the buses were desegregated. Unlike Malcolm X and his declaration to win at al costs, Martin Luther King used peaceful protest and the white man's courts to achieve his goal and to set himself up as the leader of the black people in their fight for freedom and equality within American society.
At this stage in their careers both of these great men had shown they could make a difference to other people's lives through their hard work and determination. At ages 26 and 32 respectively King and X had both surpassed the efforts of an older generation, although at this stage King was making a bigger impact than Malcolm X in the field of civil rights.
After the episode of the Montgomery Improvement Association, King and other Southern black ministers wished to build upon the success of the bus boycott in Montgomery so in 1957 they founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the two years from this date King toured India to develop his understanding of the Gandhian movement in which civil rights could be advanced using peaceful protests.
At first glance King and X's targets appeared to be the same which was to free black people from oppression by white society. In fact this is not the case. Martin Luther King did want to free the African-Americans from oppression whereas Malcolm X's view was constantly developing and although it was always focused on black oppression it was not exclusively a problem of black people in America but black people everywhere.
King was not the only person who travelled around this time; in 1959 Malcolm X travelled to the United Arab Republic, Sudan and Nigeria. Malcolm X spoke at a meeting of the African Freedom Day Rally which was sponsored by the United African Nationalist Movement on the 15 April. Soon after on the 27 May Malcolm X was issued with a passport and eight days later flew to Holland. From Holland Malcolm travelled to Egypt, Mecca, Iran, Syria, and Ghana as Elijah Muhammad's ambassador. However after this trip X stated he grew ill and was unable to make the pilgrimage to Mecca which was a disappointment to him. The publicity generated by these trips to Africa, the Middle East and India showed the similarity in the methods they used for getting their different views across to the public. However these trips were also very important for both of them to formulate their views and policies which they were later to expand upon in the USA.
Martin Luther King wanted to appeal to a broad range of supporters of whatever colour or creed. In one of his first speeches in the North since the beginning of the boycott, King addressed an enthusiastic capacity crowd of 2,500 at Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Sponsored by the Brooklyn chapter of the National Association of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the 25 March mass meeting featured brief remarks by a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and the president of the City Council. King noted his long friendship with a leader of Brooklyn's religious community. "I'm glad to see Rev. Sandy Ray out there," He said. "You know, for years he was 'Uncle Sandy' to me. In fact, I did not know he was not related to me by blood until I was 12 years old." (Ray was a college friend of King, Sr., and pastor of Bedford-Stuyvesant's Cornerstone Baptist Church). King argued against William Faulkner's admonition that integrationists "stop now for a moment." "We can't slow up," he declared, "and have our dignity and self-respect." At the end of the meeting, Rev. Gardner Taylor, pastor of the church, asked for the collection, which "was taken up in waste baskets, cake boxes, cartons, cooking utensils, and other containers," yielding more than $4,000 for the Montgomery Improvement Association. In contrast Malcolm X only preached to one constituency, the militant Islamics, and he showed his contempt for King's attempts to allow people of all creeds and colour to help gain civil rights for black people when he criticised the march to Lincoln's memorial in Washington as being "run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead a hundred years and who didn't like us when he was alive." (Source 2)
Martin Luther King drew heavily upon Ghandi's ideas of non violence in his fight for civil rights as shown when he said "I do not come here with a message of bitterness, hate or despair ... I come with a message of love and a message of hope." (Source 2) The speech was given on the New York Amsterdam News on the 31 March 1956. In the speech at his trial on the 23 March 1922 Mahatma Ghandi had stated "non violence is the first ... (and) it is the last article of my faith" (Source 4). This is in stark contrast with Malcolm X who said that "on King's word" he would send some brothers to give the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) "a taste of its own medicine."(Source 1) Of course the word never came, because King's message was about love and hope, whilst X wanted things to happen quickly and was challenging King, by laying down the gauntlet, asking King to be more aggressive. Malcolm X's stance is shown in a speech by Malcolm X in 1965 "Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it ... Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery." This is drastically different from Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" or "I have been to the Mountain Top" speeches. This clearly shows both of their mentalities, Malcolm X clearly believed in violent self-defence and decisive action whereas Martin Luther King's speeches had a very Christian approach about them and a way of counteracting the violence of Malcolm X's speeches in that they project a more peaceful alternative to X's vision. This is shown again on the 26 November 1962 when Malcolm X was informed that Martin Luther King refused to debate with him because "he has always considered his work in a positive action framework rather than engaging in consistent negative debate." (Source 1)
These speeches show that early on in King's career as a Black civil rights activist, he was eloquent and as poetic in his metaphors as he was at the end of his career. Malcolm X wanted to debate with Martin Luther King for three main reasons: so that he could debate the subject of non violence, so that he could use it to boost his fame and because in a small way King reminded Malcolm of his father, as both King and Rev. Earl Little battled to protect a nation of black people, Malcolm wished to debate the issues of civil rights with his father who was dead and King could act as a substitute.
King was always looking to expand his movement, but his style was not always popular as shown in 1960, when black college students initiated a wave of sit-in protests that led to the formation of the Student Non-violent coordinating committee. King supported the student movement and expressed an interest in creating a youth arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Student activists admired King, but they were critical of his top-down leadership style and were determined to maintain their autonomy. In contrast, Malcolm X seemed to want only one base, that of the militant Islamics.
In early 1960 Malcolm X debated the subject "Is black supremacy the answer" (Source 1) on a WMCA radio show called "pro and con". Six months later on the 21 September Malcolm spoke with Fidel Castro for half an hour at the Hotel Theresa, Harlem. This shows Malcolm as a bit of an extremist, as he was debating about black supremacy publicly and he was talking to a man who had just overthrown a despot and had replaced him with a communist regime.
This certainly highlights the difference between X and King. The fact that X was willing to go to such lengths to get his view across and actually make an impact shows his willingness to put his neck on the line for his beliefs. He even went as far as attacking President Kennedy verbally on the way he dealt with the Birmingham crisis where four black girls were killed by a dynamite blast in Sunday school at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon after on the 25 May 1963 Malcolm X is reported to criticise Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, and Floyd Patterson as "unwitting tools of white liberals" (Source 1).
However, along with the fame and accolades came conflict within the movement's leadership. Malcolm X's message of self-defence and Black Nationalism resonated with northern, urban blacks more effectively than King's call for non-violence; King also faced public criticism from a "Black Power" proponent, Stokely Carmichael, because of his peaceful approach to civil rights.
In the late 1950s and 60s while Martin Luther King was gaining national prominence, Malcolm X had become a leader in the Nation of Islam advocating armed self-defence and rejecting white allies. Malcolm's ideology shifted when he left the Nation of Islam in 1964 to obtain his goal of equal rights by using a unified, coalition-oriented struggle for black advancement. While King and Malcolm continued to be at odds over the role of violence and non-violence, Malcolm met with other civil rights organisations in the South and repeatedly tried to work with King. Although Martin Luther King and Malcolm X never worked together, Malcolm's ideology directly influenced the southern civil rights movement after his assassination in 1965 with the emergence of Black Power.
King's effectiveness was not only hindered by divisions among the black leadership, but also by the increasing resistance he encountered from national political leaders. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's extensive efforts to undermine King's leadership were intensified during 1967 as urban racial violence escalated, and King's public criticism of U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War led to strained relations with Lyndon Johnson's administration.
In late 1967, King initiated a Poor People's Campaign designed to confront economic problems that had not been addressed by earlier civil rights reforms. The following year, while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, he delivered his final address "I've been to the mountain top." The next day, 4 April 1968, King was assassinated.
King's renown has continued to grow since he became Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1963, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and his speech "I have a dream" was nominated the greatest speech of the twentieth Century by the Guardian. This reveals that apart from a longer life span Malcolm X did not achieve as much as did King in his shorter life but did protest equally as hard if not harder for civil rights. However it was King's ability to focus on important issues that led King to success. Malcolm seems to have lacked this focus throughout his life and only gained the fame that King did well after his death when he was recalled as one of the founding fathers of the militant organisation, Black Power.
Bibliography
Films:
Malcolm X by Spike Lee (1992)
Martin Luther King - the Inside Story
Websites:
Source 1: www.BrotherMalcolm.net
Source 2: www.stanford.edu
Books:
Source 3: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Clayborne Carson
Source 4: The penguin book of Historic Speeches Edited by Brian MacArthur
Source 5: Martin Luther King by Christine Hatt
Source 6: Malcolm X for Beginners by Bernard Aquina Doctor
