Rethinking Martin and Malcolm

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Rethinking Martin and Malcolm An Online
Professional Development Seminar

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• GOALS
• Deepen your understanding of the Civil Rights
  Movement and the black freedom struggle as
  represented by Martin Luther King, Jr. and
  Malcolm X.
• Compare and contrast the objectives and
  strategies pursued by King and Malcolm X and
  rethink their relationship to each other.
• Introduce primary sources that you can use in
  your teaching.

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Steven F. Lawson National Humanities Center
Fellow 1987-88 Professor Emeritus of
History Rutgers University History of the Civil
Rights Movement Running for Freedom Civil
Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941,
3rd edition (2009) Civil Rights Crossroads
Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle
(2003) Black Ballots Voting Rights in the
South, 1944-1969 (1999) In Pursuit of Power
Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics,
1965-1982 (1985) Debating the Civil Rights
Movement (with Charles Payne) (1998)

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Rethinking Martin and Malcolm Overview Difference
s Integration vs. Nationalism Nonviolence vs.
Any Means Necessary Christianity vs.
Islam Redemption vs. Revenge Consensus vs.
Polarization, Hope vs. Fear Middle-Class
Respectability vs. Working-Class Poor Rhetorical
Tone Similarities Importance of
Religion Recognition of Structural
Interconnectedness of Racism, Poverty, and
Imperialism Belief in Active Resistance Recognit
ion of Tenacity of White Racism Goals of
Freedom, Pluralism, Black Dignity and
Pride Importance of the Ballot, Economic
Opportunity and Development Inspirational
(Charismatic) Leadership Targets of Government
Surveillance and Repression Sexism
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Rethinking Martin and Malcolm Overview Importance
of Context King Pre and Post 1965 Malcolm X
Pre and Post Early 1950s and Pre and Post
1964 Interconnectedness Good Cop vs. Bad
Cop Myths King the dreamer, the White Mans
Negro Malcolm X the Proponent of Aggressive
Violence They Were Irreconcilable Opponents By
the End of Their Lives They Had Totally
Transformed Themselves
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Martin Luther King, Jr, Stride Toward Freedom,
1958. When I went to Montgomery as a pastor,
I had not the slightest idea that I would later
become involved in a crisis in which nonviolent
resistance would be applicable. I neither
started the protest nor suggested it. I simply
responded to the call of the people for a
spokesman. When the protest began, my mind,
consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to
the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime
teachings on love, and the Gandhian method of
nonviolent resistance. As the days unfolded, I
came to see the power of nonviolence more and
more. Living through the actual experience of
the protest, nonviolence became more than a
method to which I gave intellectual assent it
became a commitment to a way of life. Many of
the things that I had not cleared up
intellectually concerning nonviolence were now
solved in the sphere of practical action.
Discussion Question In explaining Kings core
values, how much weight would you give to
religion, philosophy, and practical experience?
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Malcolm X, The Autobiography, 1966 The white
people I had known marched before my minds eye.
From the start of my life. The state white
people always in our house after the other whites
I didnt know had killed my father . . . the
white people who kept calling my mother crazy
to her face and before me and my brothers and
sisters, until she finally was taken off by white
people to the Kalamazoo asylum. . . the white
judge and others who had split up the children .
. . the Swerlins, the other whites around Mason .
. . white youngsters I was in school with, and
the teachersthe one who told me in the eighth
grade to be a carpenter because thinking of
being a lawyer was foolish for a Negro . . . .
Discussion Question In explaining Malcolm Xs
core values, how much weight would you give to
religion, philosophy, and practical experience?
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Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham
Jail, 1963 We have waited for more than 340
years for our constitutional and God given
rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving
with jet like speed toward gaining political
independence, but we still creep at horse and
buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a
lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who
have never felt the stinging darts of segregation
to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious
mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and
drown your sisters and brothers at whim when you
have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and
even kill your black brothers and sisters when
you see the vast majority of your twenty million
Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of
poverty in the midst of an affluent society when
you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your
speech stammering as you seek to explain to your
six year old daughter why she can't go to the
public amusement park that has just been
advertised on television, and see tears welling
up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is
closed to colored children, and see ominous
clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her
little mental sky, and see her beginning to
distort her personality by developing an
unconscious bitterness toward white people when
you have to concoct an answer for a five year old
son who is asking "Daddy, why do white people
treat colored people so mean?" when you take a
cross country drive and find it necessary to
sleep night after night in the uncomfortable
corners of your automobile because no motel will
accept you when you are humiliated day in and
day out by nagging signs reading "white" and
"colored" when your first name becomes "nigger,"
your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you
are) and your last name becomes "John," and your
wife and mother are never given the respected
title "Mrs." when you are harried by day and
haunted by night by the fact that you are a
Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never
quite knowing what to expect next, and are
plagued with inner fears and outer resentments
when you are forever fighting a degenerating
sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand
why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a
time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men
are no longer willing to be plunged into the
abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can
understand our legitimate and unavoidable
impatience.
Discussion Question How would King respond to
the charge that nonviolent confrontations
provoked violent reactions?
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Malcolm X, Message to the Grass Roots,
1963 So I cite these various revolutions,
brothers and sisters, to show you -- you don't
have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a
turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There's no such
thing as a nonviolent revolution. The only kind
of revolution that's nonviolent is the Negro
revolution. The only revolution based on loving
your enemy is the Negro revolution. The only
revolution in which the goal is a desegregated
lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a
desegregated park, and a desegregated public
toilet you can sit down next to white folks on
the toilet. That's no revolution. Revolution is
based on land. Land is the basis of all
independence. Land is the basis of freedom,
justice, and equality.
Discussion Question Is Malcolm X correct that no
revolution can be nonviolent? How would King
respond?
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Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham
Jail, 1963 You speak of our activity in
Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather
disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my
nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I
began thinking about the fact that I stand in the
middle of two opposing forces in the Negro
community. One is a force of complacency, made up
in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years
of oppression, are so drained of self respect and
a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted
to segregation and in part of a few middle-class
Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and
economic security and because in some ways they
profit by segregation, have become insensitive to
the problems of the masses. The other force is
one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes
perilously close to advocating violence. It is
expressed in the various black nationalist groups
that are springing up across the nation, the
largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's
Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's
frustration over the continued existence of
racial discrimination, this movement is made up
of people who have lost faith in America, who
have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who
have concluded that the white man is an
incorrigible "devil." . . .I have tried to stand
between these two forces, saying that we need
emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the
complacent nor the hatred and despair of the
black nationalist. For there is the more
excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I
am grateful to God that, through the influence of
the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became
an integral part of our struggle
Discussion Question How does King use the Nation
of Islam to promote his own goals?
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Malcolm X, Message to the Grass Roots,
1963 This modern house Negro loves his master.
He wants to live near him. He'll pay three times
as much as the house is worth just to live near
his master, and then brag about "I'm the only
Negro out here." "I'm the only one on my job."
"I'm the only one in this school." You're nothing
but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you
right now and says, "Let's separate," you say the
same thing that the house Negro said on the
plantation. "What you mean, separate? From
America? This good white man? Where you going to
get a better job than you get here?" I mean, this
is what you say. "I ain't left nothing in
Africa," that's what you say. Why, you left your
mind in Africa.
Discussion Question How does Malcolm X use King
to promote his goals?
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Martin Luther King Jr., Give us the Ballot,
1957 Give us the ballot, and we will no longer
have to worry the federal government about our
basic rights. Give us the ballot , and we will
no longer plead to the federal government for
passage of an anti-lynching law we will by the
power of our vote write the law on the statute
books of the South and bring an end to the
dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of
violence. Give us the ballot, and we will
transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty
mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly
citizens. Give us the ballot, and we will fill
our legislative halls with men of goodwill and
send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will
not sign a "Southern Manifesto" because of their
devotion to the manifesto of justice. Give us
the ballot, and we will place judges on the
benches of the South who will do justly and love
mercy, and we will place at the head of the
southern states governors who will, who have felt
not only the tang of the human, but the glow of
the Divine. Give us the ballot, and we will
quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or
bitterness, implement the Supreme Court's
decision of May seventeenth, 1954 Brown v. Board
of Education.
Discussion Question What assumptions does King
make about the casting of a ballot?
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Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet, 1964 It
was the black man's vote that put the present
administration in Washington, D.C. Your vote,
your dumb vote, your ignorant vote, your wasted
vote put in an administration in Washington,
D.C., that has seen fit to pass every kind of
legislation imaginable, saving you until last,
then filibustering on top of that. And your and
my leaders have the audacity to run around
clapping their hands and talk about how much
progress we're making. And what a good president
we have. If he wasn't good in Texas, he sure
can't be good in Washington, D.C. Because Texas
is a lynch state. It is in the same breath as
Mississippi, no different only they lynch you in
Texas with a Texas accent and lynch you in
Mississippi with a Mississippi accent. And these
Negro leaders have the audacity to go and have
some coffee in the White House with a Texan, a
Southern crackerthat's all he isand then come
out and tell you and me that he's going to be
better for us because, since he's from the South,
he knows how to deal with the Southerners.
Discussion Question What assumptions does
Malcolm X make about casting ballots? Compare
them with those of King.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., Give Us the Ballot,
1957 In the midst of these prevailing
conditions, we come to Washington today pleading
with the president and members of Congress to
provide a strong, moral, and courageous
leadership for a situation that cannot
permanently be evaded. We come humbly to say to
the men in the forefront of our government that
the civil rights issue is not an ephemeral,
evanescent domestic issue that can be kicked
about by reactionary guardians of the status quo
it is rather an eternal moral issue which may
well determine the destiny of our nation in the
ideological struggle with communism. The hour is
late. The clock of destiny is ticking out. We
must act now, before it is too late.
Discussion Question What strategies does King
use to make his point?
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Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet, 1964 And
now you're facing a situation where the young
Negro's coming up. They don't want to hear that
turn the-other-cheek stuff, no. In Jacksonville,
those were teenagers, they were throwing Molotov
cocktails. Negroes have never done that before.
But it shows you there's a new deal coming in.
There's new thinking coming in. There's new
strategy coming in. It'll be Molotov cocktails
this month, hand grenades next month, and
something else next month. It'll be ballots, or
it'll be bullets. It'll be liberty, or it will be
death. The only difference about this kind of
deathit'll be reciprocal. You know what is meant
by reciprocal? . . . I don't usually deal with
those big words because I don't usually deal with
big people. I deal with small people. I find you
can get a whole lot of small people and whip hell
out of a whole lot of big people. They haven't
got anything to lose, and they've got every thing
to gain. And they'll let you know in a minute It
takes two to tango when I go, you go.
Discussion Question What strategies does Malcolm
X use to make his point?
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Martin Luther King, Jr., The Ethical Demands of
Integration, 1962 The word segregation
represents a system that is prohibitive it
denies the Negro equal access to schools, parks,
restaurants, libraries, and the like.
Desegregation is eliminative and negative, for it
simply removes these legal and social
prohibitions. Integration is creative, and is
therefore more profound and far reaching than
desegregation. Integration is the positive
acceptance of desegregation and the welcomed
participation of Negroes in the total range of
human activities. Integration is genuine
intergroup, interpersonal doing. Desegregation,
then, rightly is only a short-range goal.
Integration is the ultimate goal of our national
community.
Discussion Question How can Kings view of
integration be considered a radical objective?
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Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet 1964 Let
me explain what I mean. A segregated district or
community is a community in which people live,
but outsiders control the politics and the
economy of that community. They never refer to
the white section as a segregated community. It's
the all-Negro section that's a segregated
community. Why? The white man controls his own
school, his own bank, his own economy, his own
politics, his own everything, his own community
but he also controls yours. When you're under
someone else's control, you're segregated.
They'll always give you the lowest or the worst
that there is to offer, but it doesn't mean
you're segregated just because you have your own.
You've got to control your own. Just like the
white man has control of his, you need to control
yours. You know the best way to get rid of
segregation? The white man is more afraid of
separation than he is of integration. Segregation
means that he puts you away from him, but not far
enough for you to be out of his jurisdiction
separation means you're gone. And the white man
will integrate faster than he'll let you
separate. So we will work with you against the
segregated school system because it's criminal,
because it is absolutely destructive, in every
way imaginable, to the minds of the children who
have to be exposed to that type of crippling
education.
Discussion Question Compare Malcolm Xs analysis
of segregation to that of Kings.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From
Here? 1967 The tendency to ignore the Negro's
contribution to American life and to strip him of
his personhood is as old as the earliest history
books and as contemporary as the morning's
newspaper. To upset this cultural homicide, the
Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own
Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro's
freedom that overlooks this necessity is only
waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is
enslaved, the body can never be free.
Psychological freedom, a firm sense of
self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against
the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian
emancipation proclamation or Johnsonian civil
rights bill can totally bring this kind of
freedom. The Negro will only be free when he
reaches down to the inner depths of his own being
and signs with the pen and ink of assertive
manhood his own emancipation proclamation. And,
with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem,
the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of
self-abnegation and say to himself and to the
world, I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man
with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble
history. How painful and exploited that history
has been. Yes, I was a slave through my
foreparents and I am not ashamed of that. I'm
ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make
me a slave. Yes, we must stand up and say, I'm
black and I'm beautiful, and this
self-affirmation is the black man's need, made
compelling by the white man's crimes against
him.
Discussion Question How does Kings thinking
reflect that of Malcolm X?
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Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet, 1964 The
economic philosophy of black nationalism is pure
and simple. It only means that we should control
the economy of our community. Why should white
people be running all the stores in our
community? Why should white people be running the
banks of our community? Why should the economy of
our community be in the hands of the white man?
Why? If a black man can't move his store into a
white community, you tell me why a white man
should move his store into a black community. The
philosophy of black nationalism involves a
re-education program in the black community in
regards to economics. Our people have to be made
to see that any time you take your dollar out of
your community and spend it in a community where
you don't live, the community where you live will
get poorer and poorer, and the community where
you spend your money will get richer and richer.
Discussion Question How would King respond to
this argument?
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Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From
Here? 1967 It is perfectly clear that a
violent revolution on the part of American blacks
would find no sympathy and support from the white
population and very little from the majority of
Negroes themselves. This is no time for romantic
illusions and empty philosophical debates about
freedom. This is a time for action. What is
needed is a strategy for change, a tactical
program that will bring the Negro into the
mainstream of American life as quickly as
possible. So far, this has only been offered by
the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this
we will end up with solutions that don't solve,
answers that don't answer and explanations that
don't explain. And so I say to you today that I
still stand by nonviolence. And I am still
convinced that it is the most potent weapon
available to the Negro in his struggle for
justice in this country. And the other thing is
that I am concerned about a better world. I'm
concerned about justice. I'm concerned about
brotherhood. I'm concerned about truth. And when
one is concerned about these, he can never
advocate violence. For through violence you may
murder a murderer but you can't murder murder.
Through violence you may murder a liar but you
can't establish truth. Through violence you may
murder a hater, but you can't murder hate.
Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can
do that.
Discussion Question Why does King continue to
oppose violence?
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Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet,
1964 Last but not least, I must say this
concerning the great controversy over rifles and
shotguns. The only thing that I've ever said is
that in areas where the government has proven
itself either unwilling or unable to defend the
lives and the property of Negroes, it's time for
Negroes to defend themselves. Article number two
of the constitutional amendments provides you and
me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun. It is
constitutionally legal to own a shotgun or a
rifle. This doesn't mean you're going to get a
rifle and form battalions and go out looking for
white folks, although you'd be within your
rightsI mean, you'd be justified but that would
be illegal and we don't do anything illegal. If
the white man doesn't want the black man buying
rifles and shotguns, then let the government do
its job.
Discussion Question Under what circumstances
does Malcolm X condone violence? What would
King say?
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Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet,
1964 When we begin to get in this area, we need
new friends, we need new allies. We need to
expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher
levelto the level of human rights. Whenever you
are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know
it or not, you are confining yourself to the
jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the
outside world can speak out in your behalf as
long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle.
Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of
this country. All of our African brothers and our
Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers
cannot open their mouths and interfere in the
domestic affairs of the United States. And as
long as it's civil rights, this comes under the
jurisdiction of Uncle Sam.
Martin Luther King, Playboy Interview, 1965 The
world is now so small in terms of geographic
proximity and mutual problems that no nation
should stand idly by and watch anothers plight.
I think that in every possible instance Africans
should use the influence of their governments to
make it clear that the struggle of their brothers
in the U.S. is part of a worldwide struggle. In
short, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere, for we are tied together in a garment
of mutuality. What happens in Johannesburg
affects Birmingham, however indirectly. We are
descendants of the Africans. Our heritage is
Africa. We should never seek to break the ties,
nor should the Africans.
Discussion Question In what ways do Martin
Luther King and Malcolm X share common ground? In
what ways do they differ?
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Final slide. Thank You.