MLK and Malcolm X were more alike than we thought. Here’s why.
By Jonathan Gordon - All About History, All About History about 9 hours ago
(Excerpted)
Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are two of the most iconic figures of the 20th century and of the civil rights movement. Both men were leaders of their own separate movements, with King serving as the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Malcolm X as a minister and leading national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam (NOI). However, most people believe the two men had very different approaches to the challenge of achieving racial justice and equality in the U.S.
“The mythology around both men frames them as opposites,” said Peniel Joseph, the Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. “It frames Malcolm as King’s evil twin and King as this saint who would just give everybody a hug if he was alive right now. That really takes away from understanding the depth and breadth of their political power, their political radicalism and their evolution over time.”
“I think they both needed each other,” Joseph said. “They both had misapprehensions about each other, and they made mistakes about each other. When they started out, King thought Malcolm was this narrow, anti-white, Black nationalist. Malcolm thought King was this bourgeois, reform-minded, Uncle Tom. Neither of them were those things, so they both needed the other.
“King remains a major, global political mobilizer, and the way in which he framed this idea of racial justice globally is very important,” Joseph added. “Malcolm X was the first modern activist who was really saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ in a really deep and definitive way and became the avatar of the Black Power movement.”
Joseph believes that, while the differences between King and Malcolm X cannot be ignored, the two men were, in fact, much closer than commonly believed, though their upbringings could not have been more different. “Martin Luther King Jr. was raised in an upper-middle class, elite household in Atlanta, Georgia,” Joseph explained. “His father was a preacher, his mother was present in his life and it was a very comfortable upbringing.
“On the other hand, Malcolm X was raised in Omaha, [Nebraska], and in Lansing, Michigan, on farms, so he was a country boy, whose father was murdered by white supremacists when he was 6 years old,” Joseph said. “[H]is mother was put in a psychiatric facility, so he was a foster child by the time he was in elementary school. He then became a hustler in Boston and Harlem as a teenager, and he was finally arrested for theft and spent seven years in prison.
“When Malcolm was in prison, King was attending Morehouse College, the most prestigious historically Black, all-men’s college that you could go to then or now,” Joseph added. “He received a theological degree at seminary school, Crozer Theological school in Chester, Pennsylvania, and then got a Ph.D. at Boston University.”
King’s strong religious upbringing had a massive influence on his life, and he became a preacher as well as a political activist, including his faith within his speeches. Meanwhile, Malcolm’s tough upbringing and the tragedies he endured make a lot of sense when held against the righteous anger and pain he was able to express as a minister for the NOI.
It was during his time in prison that Malcolm was introduced to Islam by some of his siblings, and he formally joined the Nation of Islam. The NOI’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, took a personal interest in Malcolm, before he was released in 1952. Malcolm abandoned what he called his “slave” name, Little, and became Malcolm X. As a minister in the NOI, he advocated for Black separatism (which was the policy of the organization), first in Chicago and later in Harlem, New York, which would become his base for years to come.
The formative years of Malcolm X’s and King’s lives are ultimately what frame them as polarized voices in a similar struggle.
“Malcolm X was really Black America’s prosecuting attorney, and he was going to be charging white America with a series of crimes against Black humanity,” Joseph said. “I argue in ‘The Sword and the Shield’ [that], in a way, his life’s work boils down to radical Black dignity. And what he means by Black dignity is really Black people having the political self-determination to decide their own political futures and fates. They define racism, and they define anti-racism and what social justice looks like for themselves. It’s connected to the United States, but globally, it’s also connected to African decolonization, African independence, Third World independence, Middle East politics, all of it.”
By contrast, “Martin Luther King Jr. was really the defense attorney; he defended Black lives to white people and white lives to Black people,” Joseph said. “He was really advocating for radical Black citizenship, and his notion of citizenship became more expansive over time. It was going to be more than just voting rights and ending segregation. It would become about ending poverty, food justice, health care, a living wage, universal basic income for everyone.”
These two approaches — one that builds personal identity, and another that looks to express that identity and have it recognized by a system that is set up to ignore Black voices — seem more complementary than adversarial when observed objectively. “Their differences really become differences of tactics rather than goals,” Joseph said. “They’re both going to come to see that you need dignity and citizenship, and those goals are going to converge over time. But it’s the tactics and how we get to those goals” that differ.
Famously, the pair did not always see eye to eye. On multiple occasions, Malcolm X took aim at King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, referring to him as an “Uncle Tom” (though he later drew back from using the term).
For his part, King warned that “fiery, demagogic oratory in the Black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as [Malcolm X] has done, can reap nothing but grief,” according to The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
[snip]
Despite the public animosity, Malcolm X attempted to reach out to King over the years, sending articles and NOI reading materials and even inviting him to speeches and meetings. On July 31, 1963, Malcolm X even publicly called for unity.
“[T]here was a point when Malcolm was in the same room as King and on the couch, while King was doing his press conference, and they met afterwards, exchanging pleasantries,” Joseph continued. “It was a moment captured by only a couple of photos, in mid-conversation, with Malcolm recorded as saying, ‘I’m throwing myself into the heart of the Civil Rights struggle.’”
This was the first and only time the two men met.
On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in Manhattan, while about to give a speech. The impact of his death would be felt throughout the civil rights movement, but no less so on King.
“One of the surprising things is that we don’t discuss the way in which the person who is most radicalized by Malcolm’s assassination is Martin Luther King Jr.,” ....”
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