In his final nationally televised speech, delivered on March 25, 1965, King addressed American democracy, racial justice, and the challenges ahead. By August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act had passed, but just days later, the Watts uprising erupted in Los Angeles. Following the Watts uprising, King and Malcolm X's perspectives began to converge.
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The visions of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King converged following Malcolm X's assassination. King experienced a "mountaintop moment" and realized that he needed to return to the valley. The Selma to Montgomery march became a crucial event, solidifying King's conviction.
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The roles of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X intertwined in a captivating dance. However, after Malcolm X's assassination, a significant irony and transformation occurred: King assumed the role of Black America's prosecuting attorney.
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Peniel Joseph, the historian, suggests that Malcolm X served as the prosecuting attorney for Black America, accusing white America of crimes against Black humanity that stretched back to racial slavery. In contrast, King acted as the defense attorney for Black America, but he defended both sides of the color line.
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For his part, Malcolm X publicly denounced Martin Luther King many times, calling the preacher a modern-day Uncle Tom stating that “B y teaching them to love their enemy, or pray for those who use them spitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a 20th century or modern Uncle Tom, or a religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today, to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of an attack.”
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In response to Malcolm X's critique of nonviolent civil disobedience, King maintained that nonviolence was both a moral and political strategy. He believed Black people should not succumb to the idea of becoming oppressors themselves. Given that Black people were a minority in the United States, engaging in an armed conflict would result in overwhelming force being used against them.
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Malcolm X believed that if white people truly desired black Americans to be citizens, there would have been no need for protests, experiences of police violence, or brutality. Children wouldn't have had to face integration challenges at Little Rock High School, and young people wouldn't have had to endure arrests and brutality at lunch counters.
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One of the main criticisms against Malcolm X was his perceived advocacy for racial separatism. However, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam did not espouse segregation but rather separatism. In debates with figures like Bayard Rustin, Jim Farmer, James Baldwin, Louis Lomax, and others, Malcolm X argued that racial separatism was necessary because white people did not want Black people to be equal citizens with dignity.
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Malcolm X championed complete racial separation, rejecting any form of integration, and opposing King's philosophy of nonviolence as a form of protest. Malcolm X viewed King's nonviolent approach as defenseless against white racism.
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Malcolm X's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement began after he transformed his life following a period of incarceration and aligned himself with the Nation of Islam. While in prison, his siblings wrote to him, sharing the beliefs of this new religious movement, which advocated for complete racial separation as the solution to the challenges faced by black Americans.
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From the very start, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had contrasting upbringings. King hailed from a prominent middle-class family deeply rooted in the community, representing the atypical experience of southern Black individuals. Conversely, Malcolm X endured a lifetime of trauma, commencing with his father's murder and the terror inflicted upon his mother and siblings by the Ku Klux Klan.
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While Malcolm X had criticized the March on Washington, King wrote an essay in 1965 expressing his intent to employ nonviolent civil disobedience as a peaceful means to paralyze cities and pursue justice beyond civil and voting rights acts.
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