Were the strategies of Martin Luther King Junior more successful than Malcolm X in advancing equality for African Americans
An evaluation of whether Malcolm Xs or Martin Luther Kings strategy was more successful in advancing equality for African Americans needs to recognize that these mens goals were also different. King worked with white people to achieve equality Malcolm X stressed self-reliance. King used non-violent protest Malcolm X condoned violence. Malcolm X, like King, wanted equality of opportunity but he did want integration into white society. Did Congress, intimidated by violence and the threat of more violence (Malcolm Xs strategy), pass Civil Rights legislation Or, was this due to Kings non-violent strategy and his success in winning white support. Or, did both strategies contribute more or less equally Toward the end of their lives, the two men drew closer, each adopting aspects of the others strategy. After describing the two men and their strategies, this convergence is analyzed. Rejecting the claim that either man is due more credit than the other, both contributed to what achieved by the Civil Rights movement.
Malcolm X (1925-1965) Black consciousness.
Malcolm X was for most of his life vilified by white society as the former cocaine dealer and ex-convict, whose gospel was hate and whose creed was violence (Lentz 148). This did not appeal to politicians or to comfortable middle-class white America. Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) was the son of a Baptist minister (X and Haley 3). His father died in 1931, leading to changed circumstances. When his mother became mentally ill, Malcolm and his siblings were placed in care (X and Haley 25). He drifted into crime, pimping, con games of many kinds, peddling dope, and thievery of all sorts, including armed robbery (X and Harley 97). In 1946, an eight year sentence sent him to prison (X and Harley 175). It was in prison that he joined Muhammad Elijahs Nation of Islam. Later, as a minister of NOI he became its chief spokesman. Elijah, the NOI and Malcolm X preached that African-Americans could not expect justice or achieve equality in white dominated society.
Stolen from Africa, their identity, pride and dignity was also stolen. Malcolm substituted X for Little symbolizing that slavery had also stolen his real African name.Elijah taught that the black race was civilized long before white men even existed, that human historys greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh (X and Harely 187). Convinced that black people could never expect just treatment in white society, Elijah demanded a separate black state, which X supported. Only in their own state could blacks achieve their own identity, develop their own culture and lay the foundations fore a self-respecting productive community (xi). Xs message, Sitkoff says, was one of separatism and violence (154). Only the threat of violence would convince the white majority, who control Congress, to allow black Americans a state of their own.
Since 1909, the movement for racial equality had been led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, using the strategy of legal challenge to existing laws based on appeal to the Constitution. This strategy depended on white support. The NOI saw this approach as an undignified from of dependency, no better than living off welfare. Teaching the ethic of work, family responsibility, good parenting, the NOI encouraged self-reliance. However, legal gains were made by NAACP court appeals. A major victory was the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education that segregated schooling was illegal. Yet this did not result in immediate change as School Districts found ways to delay integration. In the South, segregation was a fact of life not only in schools but in shops, on the buses and in public space, with separate park benches, restrooms and drinking fountains for black and white. Realizing that even a change in law did not automatically result in an end to discrimination, segregation or hostility, African-Americans began to take direct action against an unjust system. Boycotts, strikes, marches on the one hand were often peaceful. On the other hand, some took the opportunity to act violently.
It was Malcolm X who gave voice to the anger and pain of young blacks in the ghetto. He encouraged a fighting pride in blacks which struck deep chords among the many in Afro-America who demanded faster and more fundamental changes in racial conditions and called for more forceful means to achieve these ends (Sitkoff 154). X was not the only African-American leader who preached black pride and power, self-defense or armed resistance, effectively splitting the civil rights movement into pro-violence and anti-violence wings (Kotz 362). When Congress began passing Civil Rights acts, such as the 1964 Act and the Voting Right Act (1965), violence was very much part of the.
The Voting Rights Act was itself followed by a series of riots in which the cry of Black and White Together was drowned out by that of Black Power and Burn, Baby, Burn succeeded Freedom Now (Sitkoff 200). Violence spread to the North as unprecedented numbers of blacks threw Molotov cocktails, looting and burning stores, and firing upon police (Sitkoff 202-3). Malcolm saw what he called an American nightmare not an American dream (Sitkoff 211). The Black Panthers, founded in 1966, also engaged in violence. One argument is that Civil Rights legislation was passed in the hope of ending violence, due to intimidation. This argument, though, fails to explain why violence not only continued fter new legislation but actually increased.
Martin Luther King (1929-1968) Non-Violent Protest
King, a Baptist minister and son of a minister with a doctorate from Boston University (Katz 46) was recruited to civil rights activism following an incident in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama when Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man, so was arrested. King was invited to organize and lead a bus boycott. Developing his strategy of non-violence, King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which then took a major lead in the Civil Rights struggle. While sharing the NAACPs goal of assimilation into wider American society and subscribing to the American Dream it did not rely on court appeals to achieve racial justice. It took the struggle to the streets. It was pro-active in challenging injustice, choosing Birmingham, Alabama for example in 1963 because it was highly segregated and racist and because it knew that the police chief would react violently. The aim was to attract white sympathy as peaceful protesters were attacked in the streets. King drew on Mahatma Gandhis non-violent philosophy of protest and on Christian ideas about the possibility of redemption.
He believed in common human values, that when people saw the iniquity of segregation, they would make the right moral choice and end it. In his doctoral thesis, he argued that men and women have the power to choose good over evil (Katz 46). Many white people did support King. Toward the end of his life, Kings anti-Vietnam war on poverty and anti-war campaigns attracted negative coverage but he was idolized by the media. After his death, Kings public stature grew apace, making critical assessment almost impossible (King 86). The media tends to depict him as almost single-handedly responsible for Civil Rights progress. In this view, it was Kings non-violent strategy and not Malcolm Xs militancy that proved to be more effective. King became more militant at the end but was resurrected as the gentle prophet by the media (Lentz 307).
The two strategies coalesced
To the media, King and X presented convenient contrasts Kings name evokes a warm civic memory as the integrationist preacher, an example of the triumph of good over evil (Romano 145). X was a symbol of black rage (Lentz 309). Howard-Pitney (2004) argues, however, that the relationship between X and King was more complex. After his break with the Nation of Islam, when he retracted his view of black racial superiority and embraced equality of all people, X shifted away from separatism (Lentz 258). In September, 1964 he began to cooperate with King to pressure Congress to reform the law, despite having famously called him an Uncle Tom (Lentz 114). During most of his life, X saw Kings strategy as playing the white mans game, the religious, participatory, democratic and liberal dimensions of the movement seemed hopelessly reformist or bourgeois or white and usually all three together (King 5). King, for his part, drew closer to Xs militancy in his later years, denouncing the USA as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and calling capitalism the cause of social and racial inequality (King 141). King lauded Malcolm on the occasion of his death (Romano 141), challenging the idea of irreconcilable polarity.
Even as King advocated love of all people, Malcolm X preached separatism and violence (Sitkoff 153). Both men had constituencies. King spoke for some but not for all African-Americans (King 90). X certainly spoke for some. To evaluate who was more effective in stimulating change is impossible. Legislation was passed both to discourage violence and to acknowledge the depth of public support for better race relations.
Malcolm X (1925-1965) Black consciousness.
Malcolm X was for most of his life vilified by white society as the former cocaine dealer and ex-convict, whose gospel was hate and whose creed was violence (Lentz 148). This did not appeal to politicians or to comfortable middle-class white America. Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) was the son of a Baptist minister (X and Haley 3). His father died in 1931, leading to changed circumstances. When his mother became mentally ill, Malcolm and his siblings were placed in care (X and Haley 25). He drifted into crime, pimping, con games of many kinds, peddling dope, and thievery of all sorts, including armed robbery (X and Harley 97). In 1946, an eight year sentence sent him to prison (X and Harley 175). It was in prison that he joined Muhammad Elijahs Nation of Islam. Later, as a minister of NOI he became its chief spokesman. Elijah, the NOI and Malcolm X preached that African-Americans could not expect justice or achieve equality in white dominated society.
Stolen from Africa, their identity, pride and dignity was also stolen. Malcolm substituted X for Little symbolizing that slavery had also stolen his real African name.Elijah taught that the black race was civilized long before white men even existed, that human historys greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh (X and Harely 187). Convinced that black people could never expect just treatment in white society, Elijah demanded a separate black state, which X supported. Only in their own state could blacks achieve their own identity, develop their own culture and lay the foundations fore a self-respecting productive community (xi). Xs message, Sitkoff says, was one of separatism and violence (154). Only the threat of violence would convince the white majority, who control Congress, to allow black Americans a state of their own.
Since 1909, the movement for racial equality had been led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, using the strategy of legal challenge to existing laws based on appeal to the Constitution. This strategy depended on white support. The NOI saw this approach as an undignified from of dependency, no better than living off welfare. Teaching the ethic of work, family responsibility, good parenting, the NOI encouraged self-reliance. However, legal gains were made by NAACP court appeals. A major victory was the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education that segregated schooling was illegal. Yet this did not result in immediate change as School Districts found ways to delay integration. In the South, segregation was a fact of life not only in schools but in shops, on the buses and in public space, with separate park benches, restrooms and drinking fountains for black and white. Realizing that even a change in law did not automatically result in an end to discrimination, segregation or hostility, African-Americans began to take direct action against an unjust system. Boycotts, strikes, marches on the one hand were often peaceful. On the other hand, some took the opportunity to act violently.
It was Malcolm X who gave voice to the anger and pain of young blacks in the ghetto. He encouraged a fighting pride in blacks which struck deep chords among the many in Afro-America who demanded faster and more fundamental changes in racial conditions and called for more forceful means to achieve these ends (Sitkoff 154). X was not the only African-American leader who preached black pride and power, self-defense or armed resistance, effectively splitting the civil rights movement into pro-violence and anti-violence wings (Kotz 362). When Congress began passing Civil Rights acts, such as the 1964 Act and the Voting Right Act (1965), violence was very much part of the.
The Voting Rights Act was itself followed by a series of riots in which the cry of Black and White Together was drowned out by that of Black Power and Burn, Baby, Burn succeeded Freedom Now (Sitkoff 200). Violence spread to the North as unprecedented numbers of blacks threw Molotov cocktails, looting and burning stores, and firing upon police (Sitkoff 202-3). Malcolm saw what he called an American nightmare not an American dream (Sitkoff 211). The Black Panthers, founded in 1966, also engaged in violence. One argument is that Civil Rights legislation was passed in the hope of ending violence, due to intimidation. This argument, though, fails to explain why violence not only continued fter new legislation but actually increased.
Martin Luther King (1929-1968) Non-Violent Protest
King, a Baptist minister and son of a minister with a doctorate from Boston University (Katz 46) was recruited to civil rights activism following an incident in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama when Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man, so was arrested. King was invited to organize and lead a bus boycott. Developing his strategy of non-violence, King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which then took a major lead in the Civil Rights struggle. While sharing the NAACPs goal of assimilation into wider American society and subscribing to the American Dream it did not rely on court appeals to achieve racial justice. It took the struggle to the streets. It was pro-active in challenging injustice, choosing Birmingham, Alabama for example in 1963 because it was highly segregated and racist and because it knew that the police chief would react violently. The aim was to attract white sympathy as peaceful protesters were attacked in the streets. King drew on Mahatma Gandhis non-violent philosophy of protest and on Christian ideas about the possibility of redemption.
He believed in common human values, that when people saw the iniquity of segregation, they would make the right moral choice and end it. In his doctoral thesis, he argued that men and women have the power to choose good over evil (Katz 46). Many white people did support King. Toward the end of his life, Kings anti-Vietnam war on poverty and anti-war campaigns attracted negative coverage but he was idolized by the media. After his death, Kings public stature grew apace, making critical assessment almost impossible (King 86). The media tends to depict him as almost single-handedly responsible for Civil Rights progress. In this view, it was Kings non-violent strategy and not Malcolm Xs militancy that proved to be more effective. King became more militant at the end but was resurrected as the gentle prophet by the media (Lentz 307).
The two strategies coalesced
To the media, King and X presented convenient contrasts Kings name evokes a warm civic memory as the integrationist preacher, an example of the triumph of good over evil (Romano 145). X was a symbol of black rage (Lentz 309). Howard-Pitney (2004) argues, however, that the relationship between X and King was more complex. After his break with the Nation of Islam, when he retracted his view of black racial superiority and embraced equality of all people, X shifted away from separatism (Lentz 258). In September, 1964 he began to cooperate with King to pressure Congress to reform the law, despite having famously called him an Uncle Tom (Lentz 114). During most of his life, X saw Kings strategy as playing the white mans game, the religious, participatory, democratic and liberal dimensions of the movement seemed hopelessly reformist or bourgeois or white and usually all three together (King 5). King, for his part, drew closer to Xs militancy in his later years, denouncing the USA as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and calling capitalism the cause of social and racial inequality (King 141). King lauded Malcolm on the occasion of his death (Romano 141), challenging the idea of irreconcilable polarity.
Even as King advocated love of all people, Malcolm X preached separatism and violence (Sitkoff 153). Both men had constituencies. King spoke for some but not for all African-Americans (King 90). X certainly spoke for some. To evaluate who was more effective in stimulating change is impossible. Legislation was passed both to discourage violence and to acknowledge the depth of public support for better race relations.
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