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Martin Luther King and Malcolm X: compared and contrasted

There are key ideas raised by the lives of these two individuals who were so similar in terms of race, nationality and historical period, yet so different in the way they addressed some major ethical issues of their time.  

The fundamental ideas cluster around themes of rights, equality, separatism versus communitarianism, as well as social and economic issues and justice. Both men wanted the same thing; civil rights for black people, but chose totally different routes in attempting to achieve this.

I will attempt to philosophically analyse why this was the case.

The first fundamental factor in forming their views must have been their cultural and family backgrounds, and their personal history.

Luther King Jr was born into a. into a middle-class Baptist family, in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929. Both his father and grandfather were Baptist preachers who had been actively involved in the civil rights movement.  There are stories about how he experienced segregation as a young boy, yet both his parents gave him positive and visionary explanations (1).  As a bright student and an able orator, he entered college and decided to become a Christian minister.  

I'm the son of a preacher . . . my grandfather was a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher, my only brother is a preacher, my daddy's brother is a preacher, so I didn't have much choice’. (2)

Whilst undertaking his degree he first heard of Gandhi's non-violent movement that had won independence for India, and he began to think of how such methods might be used by the black people in America.  It appeared to him that Gandhi ‘was probably the first person to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful effective social force on a large scale.’

Malcolm X had very different experiences in comparison with the secure and comfortable childhood of King. Malcolm Little, was also born to an American Baptist preacher, in 1925.

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(1)  When he was six years old, two white playmates were told not to play with him, and his mother had to explain about segregation: She told him it was a social condition, and that he was as good as anyone else.  Michael’s father lifted the boy's vision to a higher plane: he told him about Martin Luther, the great religious leader of the Reformation, saying that from now on they would both be named after him.

(2)         Martin Luther King - The Legacy - ITV 1988

His father’s support for Marcus Garvey of UNIA (3) propelled him into a confrontation with the KKK, even though Garvey preached peace and harmony between black and white in America.  In 1929 Malcolm’s father’s house was burnt down and in 1931 it was generally assumed that he was murdered after his body was found.   Malcolm’s teenage years were parentless and Malcolm became involved in crime and drugs until at 19 he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.

Malcolm became a black Muslim while in prison.  His whole life dramatically changed under the influence of the Honourable Elijah Muhammad. He studied his teachings in great detail.

The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been ‘whitened’- when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out. Mr. Muhammad couldn’t have written anything that would have struck me much harder.’(4)

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Malcolm at last gained an education as he devoured books in prison about black civilisations and struggles against injustice.

‘I never will forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slavery’s total horror … Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation’. (4)

This demonstrates that both King and Malcolm X’s education, family circumstances and experiences of white people almost certainly affected their reactions to white society.  Perhaps this provides some of the reasons to explain ...

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