ABSTRACT
James Cone wrote that ‘if Americans of all races intend to create a just and peaceful future, then they must listen to both Martin and Malcolm’.1
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were the most influential black leaders of the last century. Traditional narratives of their work as civil rights activists portray the men as great ideological opposites. King’s dream of racial integration in the United States, to be achieved through redemptive love, is juxtaposed with Malcolm’s hatred of white America and the fiery rhetoric of this archetypal angry young black man. Although significantly different in their outlook, largely because of their contradictory backgrounds, the two men did share common ground. Malcolm moved closer to Martin in his embrace of human rights in the year before his assassination in 1965 and King thought more deeply about those in the ghetto, whose struggles Malcolm voiced, before he too was gunned down. The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the ideas and legacy of
these two men, and to link them to problems facing black Americans at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Neither Martin’s ‘dream’ nor Malcolm’s ‘nightmare’ fully describes the experience of African-Americans in the contemporary United States. Since the 1960s progress for some has been offset by worsening problems for others. Popular images of Martin and Malcolm, however, have been shaped in order to reduce the potency of their messages of change. Malcolm is portrayed as the angry and violent face of Black Power, whilst his increasing embrace of human rights for all is ignored. Martin is sanitised as a moderate, a welcomed antithesis to Malcolm’s anger, and his meaning is dominated by the rhetoric of hope expressed in his famous ‘I have a Dream’ oration. Their legacies have been shaped in such a way as to neutralise the call for sweeping social changes that both were voicing before they were killed. Crucially, the economically and socially deprived black Americans who these men
increasingly championed remain an unhealed scar on the nation’s landscape. Although they were both born into Baptist families, Malcolm
and Martin experienced radically different childhoods. In his autobiography Martin recalled that the Church had always been a ‘second home’ for him. His parents taught him that as a Christian he should love white people even though he did not have to accept racial oppression.2
Malcolm’s father was an active member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and attracted the attention of white supremacists. The family home was burned to the ground and when Malcolm was six years old his father was murdered. Wracked by grief and unable to cope with the strain of supporting her family, his mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital.3 The broken home of Malcolm’s childhood was, therefore, far from the relatively affluent and comfortable family life that King enjoyed. Their experience of education also differed sharply. King attended
Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary where his reading of the social gospel theorist Walter Rauschenbusch further convinced him of the need for the Church to concern itself with social problems. In his 1960 essay ‘Pilgrimage to Non-violence’, King also writes of the great influence of Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and the power of love.4 Malcolm was a promising student, a bright and articulate young man. In his autobiography, however, he tells of being expelled from his Junior High School in Lansing, Michigan, after placing a drawing pin on the seat of his white teacher. Malcolm was sent to a reform school, where he was educated alongside mainly white classmates. Disillusioned by life at the reform school after his English teacher told him that his race made his ambition of becoming a lawyer impractical, Malcolm wrote to his half-sister in Boston and asked to go and live with her in 1941.5
