Malcolm And Martin

This year Black Voices launched our Black History Month festivities on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the annual mid-January commemoration of the life and work of the civil rights movement's most celebrated leader, a man who so changed the country and the world, that the nation has deemed it fitting to honor him in perpetuity by making his birthday a national holiday.

But, of course, King was not alone in provoking the historic shifts in thinking during what we now regard as the civil rights era. And so it may be equally fitting that as we approach the end of Black History Month, that we re-examine the contributions of another giant of the movement, who offered a radically different world view from King's.

This month marks the 41st anniversary of the death of Malcolm X, who for much of the time he was alive and talking about freedom and justice for American blacks, presented a stark counterpoint to King's approach of civil disobedience. One called for nonviolent change, the other armed revolution. King sought to inspire and calm; Malcolm set out to inflame and agitate. Amazingly, they never had a real conversation, but Malcolm X, a few weeks before he died, would tell King's wife, Coretta, that maybe his confrontational tactics would make it easier for her husband to succeed. "If white people realize what the alternative is," he explained, "perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King."

Both men would die at the hands of assassins; both were 39, both left behind large families and formidable and influential widows. And each came to embody an idea and an approach about how racial justice was to be achieved -- King's non-violent negotiation and compromise or Malcolm’s confrontation and conflict. As the fight for racial justice continues, the interplay between their two philosophies continues a generation after their deaths.

King was a disciple of Ghandi who insisted that non-violence was the only effective way to wage the battle for equality. Malcolm X, thought that approach naïve and counterproductive. King pushed a racial idyll, most famously in his "I Have Dream Speech" in which he longed for an end to segregation and the dawn of a racial harmony, when "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls."

Malcolm X was a self-described revolutionary, who adopted both the rhetoric and tactics of one. He often derided the idea that black people, who had been so viciously and violently oppressed, should resort to peaceful means to achieve their freedom. In November 1963, three months after King's speech at the March on Washington, Malcolm X had this to say about non-violent struggle: "The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy, is the Negro revolution." And for effect, "Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution destroys and over turns everything that gets in its way," he added.

The March on Washington, which stands as an iconic American moment, only drew Malcolm X's scorn: He thought it had been hijacked by white moderates and liberals for their own purposes: "And as they took it over it lost its militancy," he lamented a few months later, "It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising."

It is fair to note that King is held in much wider regard: He won to Nobel Peace Prize, after all: His birthday is a national holiday, and when his widow passed away a few weeks ago, four U.S. presidents shared the stage at her funeral. The best Malcolm X could do on that front was to have his face on a U. S. postage stamp, but there are those who would argue that the revolutionary spirit of Malcolm X is more vibrant in today’s culture than the often passive/aggressive approach of King’s non-violent movement.

There are those who point to hip-hop, the dominant cultural motif of the moment, as more evidence that Malcolm has had his triumphs. With its often stridently political rhetoric and confrontational attitude, hip-hop, is more Malcolm than Martin.

And all across the country this week there will be tributes to the fiery slain leader. From Nebraska to Ohio there are Malcolm X memorials planned. Students in Indiana are putting on a play in which Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. eventually have a conversation. The two men had a brief and cordial meeting in March 1964 when they ran into each other in the U.S. Capitol, but they never really talked, except, of course, on the larger historical stage. The debate endures.

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