MLK In His Own Words

If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. (Yes) And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.

I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.

-Martin Luther King Jr, February 1968

Drum Major Instinct

Lost in the narrative of the uprising in North Africa and the Middle East is the model and inspiration Arabs are drawing from Martin Luther King and by extension the 1960 African American freedom struggle . Depicted as a comic-book action hero, Martin Luther King trumpets justice, advocates nonviolent struggle, and “dreams of a promised land that protest might bring.” Read more at:

http://afro-americanstudies.com/blog/wp-login.php

Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation

Author: Rawn James

The Supreme Court 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered one of the milestones of the civil rights movement. James Rawn explores the two men,  Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, and the institutions they built- Howard University School of Law and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, as well as the legal strategies they developed, to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This is a must and inspirational read. You will have a deeper appreciation for the dedication, commitment, and intellectual and legal brilliance of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall.

Motown In Love: Lyrics From the Golden Era

Author: Herb Jordan

Detroit in the 1960s was an unlikely stage for a production that featured some of the most inspirational love songs ever written. It may seem equally unlikely, given today’s portrayal of black men that most of those songs were written by young black men. Default notions of romance are an awkward overlay to the reality of today’s popular music with its devaluation and degradation of women and love.

Herb Jordan catalogues the love songs of Motown which were the soundtrack of a generation and America’s Great Songbook. In this songbook, black men unashamedly declare their love for their women with a delicacy of surgeon.  Poet laureate, Smokey Robinson, wrote of love for a woman as “a rosebud blooming in the warmth of the summer sun.” Besides the delight of the Motown love lyrics, Jordan reminds of soft and sensitive side of black men who found meaning in love (not guns and gangs) and identity in their relationships with their women- their other half.

The Sea is Wide and My Boat is so Small: Charting the Course for the Next Generation

Author: Marian Wright Edelman

Written in the form of letters, Marian Wright Edelman reflects on the state of children in America and what must be done to provide a caring and nurturing context for their growth and well-being. This meditative manifesto is a discourse on building the “village” we often talk about in raising children. On a Prayer For Twenty-First-Century Children, Edelman juxtaposes what is required with what is desired and embraced: “God help us to raise a new generation of children/With highly developed computer skills but poorly developed consciences…With a gigantic commitment to the big “I” but little sense of responsibility to the bigger “we”. She leaves no stone unturned in the service of building a better and more caring society for children. This should be required reading for adults.

The Warmth of Other Suns

Author: Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns is Wilkerson’s first book. (Its title is borrowed from the celebrated black writer Richard Wright, who fled Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1920s to feel the warmth of those other suns.) Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is an epic narrative of one of the great migrations witnessed in America. The migration of black from the South to the North is often presented as a failed “social experiment.” These blacks are too frequently demeaned in literature as the wretched of the earth: thrown together in dead-end Northern slums, cast as poor illiterates who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness and welfare dependency wherever they went.

Yet, Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns tells another story. Today, these black migrants are viewed as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s. What linked them together, Wilkerson writes, was their heroic determination to roll the dice for a better future. This is a delightful read and a departure from negative narrative of black life which is so often presented as the quintessential fact of black in America.

The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations

Author: Ira Berlin

The Four Great Migrations frame the history of people of African descent in America, setting the paths by which Africans and then African Americans made and remade black and American life between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. These four massive upheavals form the foundation of Ira Berlin’s sweeping new interpretation of the African American experience.

This book is certainly a companion read to The Warmth of Other Suns, and one that will not disappoint. Tracing the transit from Africa to America, Virginia to Alabama, Biloxi to Chicago, and Lagos to the Bronx, Berlin challenges the traditional presentation of a linear, progressive development of black America. The Making of African America speaks of the old giving way to the new, innovation dancing with tradition, change challenging stasis- a two beat theme that has a profound effect on African American communities, families and individual lives, continually remaking all aspects of black culture from language to working patterns, from religion to art.

Die young, die middle age, die old, but remember that the most useful life and most abundant life is the one in which one dreams that which will never completely come true, and chooses ideals that forever beckon buy forever elude. To seek a goal that is worthy, so all-embracing, so all-consuming, and so challenging that one can never completely attain it, is the life magnificent; it is the only life worth living.

-Benjamin E. Mays

Before there was the March on Washington which moved the conscience of America, before there was the Selma to Montgomery marches which produced the Voting Rights Act, before the sit-in demonstrations which led to the desegregation of lunch counters and other public places , before Kwame Toure could advocate  black power,  before Martin Luther King could deliver the “Dream Speech”, before Marian Wright Edelman would establish the Children Defense Fund, Benjamin Mays, preacher-educator, assumed the awesome responsibility of preparing leaders of the civil rights and 1960s movement.

Mays anticipated the civil rights movement and understood above all else that the mental revolution had to precede the social revolution. He saw education as the mechanism to help overturn the state of inferiority and fear that the majority of blacks, including student held. Although he taught no classes, his philosophy permeated the method of instruction at Morehouse.  Martin Luther King Jr., said of his experience at Morehouse: “There was a freer atmosphere at Morehouse and it was there that I had my first frank discussion of race. The [professors] encouraged us in a positive quest for solutions to radial ills and for the first time in my life, I realized that nobody was afraid.”

Consistent with King’s experience and observation, Mays saw the black school as well as the black church as the two centers of resistance. Thus, he infused and integrated the spiritual and ethical teaching of Christianity into the Morehouse educational philosophy, addressing the fundamental issue of the black condition-oppression and manhood. Mays did not he said to “make lawyers or doctors or teachers but men.”

Against the traditional view of college and education, Mays introduced and advocated a conception of education which mirrored WEB Dubois’s view of education.

The problem of education… among the Negro must first of all deal wit the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter of educational experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers, but not necessity men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of schools.

Benjamin Mays understood Dubois’s educational philosophy, seeing education as instrument of liberation if it was grounded in producing a new black man (and woman) who would use his (her) education to better society and in the process improve the condition of black people. To be sure, Mays wanted to invent new souls. He wanted to root out the weakness and inferiority that heritage of three hundred years of mental and social oppression imposed on blacks and their way of seeing themselves and the world. He used his weekly Tuesday morning chapel lecture to encourage and teach a new way of thinking and doing.

May’s educational philosophy had a threefold purpose: 1) to train the mind to think clearly, logically and constructively, 2) to train the heart to understand and empathize with the aspirations, conditions, suffering and injustice of humankind, beginning with black people, and ) to strengthen the will to act in the interest of the common good. In the context of this framework, Mays exhorted the student at Morehouse to “Do whatever you do so well that no man living and no man yet unborn could do it better.” And, for him the “greatest crime was to give up”; and the “greatest sin was to aim low”

Marian Wright Edelman writes, Morehouse chapel, like Spelman’s was rich not only in music but in eloquence and in wisdom. Its president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, Martin Luther King, Jr, mentor, and other inspirational speakers shared with us what they believed, had experience and thought we needed to know to make it in the world and to make the world a better place by not becoming the… They taught us to be neither victims or victimizers They preached that service to community was a higher value than service to self, that conscience to precedent over career, that respect for life—our own and others- was inviolate.”

Thus, Mays demand that strength and a sense of mission from Morehouse students. “No person” he said, “deserves to be congratulated unless he has done the best he could with the mental equipment he has under he existing circumstances.” He sought to create a new student, a new man who saw himself capable of meeting the demands and conditions of black life. He often told his student body, “If Morehouse is not good enough for anybody, it not good enough for Negroes.
A witness for freedom and a creator of the future, Mays created a climate and context at Morehouse and beyond that bore fruit. A partial listing of the men and women, who were, mentored, influenced or by Mays reads like a who’s who of the civil and women’s rights movements: Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond (led sit-in protest in Atlanta and first , Maynard Jackson, Mayor of Atlanta), Michael Lomax (first black elected Chairman of Fulton County Commission), Leroy Johnson (first member of Georgia Senate since Reconstruction), Marian Wright Edelman ( Children Defense Fund), Lerone Bennett (social historian and editorial staff of Ebony for over 50 years), Horace Ward (Federal Judge), Howard Thurman (influential American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader) Charlayne Hunter-Gault (American journalist and foreign correspondent, first black graduate of University of Georgia), (founded the Morehouse School of Medicine and Secretary of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services), and Samuel D Cook (President, Dillard university).

We salute Benjamin Mays, educator extraordinaire and schoolmaster of the civil rights movement.

Who was Charles Hamilton Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston built the intellectual and framework and the legal strategy and infrastructure and which led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court.  While often heralded as a reversal of long-standing Jurisprudence, the Supreme Court’s decision in  Brown v. Board of Education was in fact and extension of the Court’s earlier decisions. Houston successfully argued most of these cases, laying the groundwork for the and set in motion the legal precedents which led to the overturning of Brown v. Board of Education decision

Howard University

Howard University was the nation’s premier school for black attorneys. Yet, when Mordecai Johnson, first black president of Howard University, appointed Hamilton Dean of Howard’s Law School, it lacked accreditation and was called by the wealthiest black residents of Washington D.C “a dummy’s retreat.” Houston soon enacted sweeping reforms that transformed the law school into an institution with uncompromising rigor and singularity of purpose, drawing comparison to the military academy at West Point.

Both Mordecai Johnson and Hamilton held the belief that the average white lawyer, especially in the South could not be relied upon to “wage an uncompromising fight for equal rights for [blacks].” One out of every four African American law students was attending Howard, and if they were to benefit their race, the law school must, Houston believed, “equip its students with the direct professional skills most useful to them.”

To remake Howard School of Law, Houston, terminated incompetent and lackadaisical law professor and recruited a cadre of highly qualified instructors. He revamped the entire curriculum, making it academically rigorous. Next, Houston eliminated the night school. He believed this was the only way for administrators and professors to focus their energies on developing a full- time day school worthy of being accredited by the Association of American law school and American Bar Association.

And finally, for Houston Howard’s accreditation only marked beginning of the work ahead. Armed with the schools hard-earned credentials, he directed the law school to redouble its efforts to graduate lawyers fit to effects social gains. Houston did not demand from his students and faculty all that they could give; he exacted from them all that he deemed necessary to prepare them for what lay ahead.

One of Houston’s enduring and most prized accomplishments was his cultivation and mentoring of Thurgood Marshall.  As Rawn James, author, Root and Branch, writes:  “In Houston’s presence Marshall sparked like a match touched to flame. He admired the Dean’s singular devotion to excellence, his contempt for good enough, and this admiration kindled within him those same traits. Houston spent most of his waking hours in the law school and Thurgood was right there with him.” It would Marshall who would

Charles Hamilton Houston’s Strategy for dismantling Racial Segregation
In 1934, Houston composed a proposal solicited by the NAACP, a memorandum setting for a legal plan to attack racial segregation nationwide, in schools, buses and trains. It was an audacious and prayerful plan, firmly rooted in a belief that the Constitution did not allow America to remain as it was. Houston charted a novel course: to defeat the law of separate but equal, he would call for the enforcement of separate but equal.

Houston augured for concentrating the fight against discrimination in education on two fronts: against the race-based best unequal allocation of public school funds and against differentials in teacher salaries in schools for white and black students. Houston aimed “(1)  to arouse and strengthen the will of a local communities to demand and fight for their rights and;(2)  to work out model procedures through actual test in court which can be used by local communities in similar cases brought by them on their own initiative in the resources. That is, the lawyers would ask the court to enforce the law of the land- – to make separate but equal truly equal. Because the segregated cities, counties, and states could not afford to equalize their facilities, they were unable to for fulfill the mandates set forth by the Supreme Court in Plessy V Ferguson. He thus reasoned that the states would be order to integrate because it was the only way to provide equal schools and facilities to black and white Americans.

Houston, Marshall and the NAACP achieved success and acclaim in litigating cases in various states as they arose, the most celebrated Murray v. Maryland.  However, Houston believed that the NAACP litigating state-by-state like salesmen knocking on doors was a losing strategy. Hence, he argued that the time had come for federal precedent to change the lives of black and white American alike, to demand a possible and insist it necessary. Missouri ex rel. Gains v. Canada presented this opportunity. Houston appealed this matter to the Supreme Court of the United States. (The Law School at the University of Missouri refused admission to Lloyd Gains because he was an African American). On December 12, 1938 Chief Justice Hughes announced the Supreme Court’s decision, declaring:

The question was what opportunities Missouri it’s so furnished to white students and denies to blacks solely on the grounds of color. The federal Constitution required each state to provide for its black and white citizens equally, if separately, and Missouri could not shift this responsibility to its neighbors; the State was bound to furnish within its borders facilities for legal education substantially equal to go which the State there afforded for all for persons of white race. Because Missouri furnished no separate but equal schools for Gains to attend because Gains’ right to a legal education was a personal one, the state had to admit him to the University Of Missouri School Of Law.

Thus, the strategy launch by Charles Houston in the Gains’ case would come to fruition and yield its most successful outcome, twenty years later in Brown v. Board of Education. After the death of Houston, in 1950 Marshall assumed the role of Special Counsel for the NAACP and assembled the team of attorneys who would put together the strategy for all of the cases folded into Brown: Public schools segregated for black children violated the Fourteenth Amendment because they were unequal to and separated from the school fro white children. The lawyers resolved that every school case they henceforth would filed would be “aimed at obtaining education on a non-segregated basis and that no relief other than that [would] be acceptable.”

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court heard the case of Brown v. Board of Education and ruled: “We conclude-unanimously-that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate bur equal’ has not place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Every since, Houston and Marshall had lunched their legal campaign in 1935, the two held as their “single objective the destroying of racial segregation in public education.” Brown was a victory for ‘root and branch”- Houston and Marshall.

King believed that America the madness of militarism was destroying American society, making it a sponsor of state terrorism.

And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I’m going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken. God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. There’s a war in Vietnam, and we are criminals in that war. We have committed more war crimes almost than any sensation in the world. And I’m going to continue to say it. We won’t stop it, because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has the priority to put nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying, “Don’t play with me!

King taught all of America, but in particular blacks that they had a moral obligation to struggle against evil and injustice.

To accept passively and unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.  The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds man that he is his brother’s keeper. To accept injustice or segregation is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right. It is a way of allowing his conscience to fall asleep. At this moment the oppressed fails to be his brother’s keeper. So acquiescence-often the easier way- is not the moral way. It is the way of the coward.

King was an apostle of justice and taught that injustice had to be confronted all the time.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

“To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves and of themselves.”

Sekou Toure, President Guinea

The 1960s freedom struggle was reaffirmation of Sekou Toure postulation that the freedom struggle informs and produces the songs and artistic expression of the times. His statement also addresses the concern by some that black music, in particular “Rap”, is to profane denigrating, especially as it relates to women. Toure’s statement suggests that conditions create consciousness and consciousness creates songs. Hence, the demand for a change in black music is demand to change the social conditions out of which the music comes.

Black music in the 1960s and early 1970s reflected and was informed by social movement which swept across America. “Black people” as poet, singer and musician Gil Scott Heron remarked, were in the “streets looking for a better tomorrow.” Moreover, the civil rights and the black power movements served as the catalyst of a new ethos for a new people.

A Change is Coming

In 1963 when Martin Luther King gave his historic I Have A Dream Speech at the March on Washington, Sam Cooke echoed the optimism of the movement, recording that same year what would become an anthem for the American Civil Rights Movement, “A Change Is Gonna Come”: “It’s been a long, a long time coming /but I know A change gon’ come oh yes it will.” Cooke reminds his listeners   that the struggle is long and difficult, but he is up to the task because he knows change is coming- “There been times that I thought I wouldn’t last for long/ Now think I’m able to carry on/ A change gon’ come, oh yes it will.”

Keep on Pushing

Change, however, was not easy, nor was it automatic. As the civil rights movement spread and protest increased, black and the movement were met with an upsurge in white terror and violence most notably the 16th Street Baptist church bombing and the murder of three civil rights workers by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.  Curtis Mayfield, song writer, singer and unofficial griot of the movement, lifted the spirit of everyone with his hit single, Keep on Pushing: “I’ve got to keep on pushing I can’t stop now,” Mayfield exhorts blacks. He’s sure blacks will attain freedom if they keep their soul (their moral essence), singing, “Now maybe some day/ I’ll reach that higher goal I know that I can make it/ With just a little bit of soul”. Mayfield lets black know that they will be victorious because history and righteousness-the real and enduring force- is on their side: “’Cause I’ve got my strength And it don’t make sense/ Not to keep on pushin’.”

Mayfield again signals that opposing forces are on the horizon: “Now look-a look (look-a look)/ A-look-a yonder. What’s that I see/ A great big stone wall/ Stands there ahead of me.” but now, he lets us know things have changed. Black people have a new pride and self-consciousness and are no longer intimidated. He punctuates this phrase with a religious reference at the end “But I’ve got my pride/ And I’ll move on aside/ And keep on pushin/ Hallelujah, hallelujah”.

We’re A Winner

By the mid-sixties, dashikis, and the “natural”-a hair style associated with Africa and black consciousness movement, “Black is Beautiful” affirmation, and the adoption of African names were normative and informed everyday life for African Americans. Curtis Mayfield gave voice to the spirit and ethos of African Americas with a bold and affirmative statement- “We’re A Winner.” “We’re A Winner,” a Number 1 soul hit, became an anthem of the black power and black pride movements when it was released in late 1967,^] much as Mayfield’s  earlier “Keep on Pushing” (whose title is quoted in the lyrics of “We’re a Winner”) had been an anthem for Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. “As a young man,” Mayfield states, “I was writing songs like ‘Keep on Pushing’ and ‘This is My Country’ and feeling all the love and all I observed politically. Of course with everything I saw on the streets as a young black kid, it wasn’t hard during the late fifties and early sixties for me to write in my own heartfelt way of how I visualized things, how I thought things ought to be.”

That “We’re A Winner” became a number 1 hit is a testimony to how the song captured the heart and minds of black people. Many radio stations banned or refused to play “We’re A Winner”, associating the record with the black power movement, and the more militant phase of the freedom struggle.  The record starts with female voices (representing everyday community folk) in the background, and then a two chord introduction indicating that sounding of importance would follow. At the beginning of the song, Mayfield asserts the new self-concept of black, “We’re a winner/ And never let anybody say/Boy, you can’t make it/‘Cause a feeble mind is in your way. To reinforce the new identity of African Americans he asserts, No more tears do we cry/ And we have finally dried our eyes/ And we’re movin’ on up (movin’ on up). Highlighting the pride which black had started displaying among themselves and the world, he says: We’re living proof in alls alert/ That we’re two from the good black earth/ And we’re a winner/ And everybody knows it too.

Mayfield then moves to affirming and make the link between black leadership and progress by the black masses, reinforcing the unity of the movement: We’ll just keep on pushin’/ Like your leaders tell you to.” This is followed by a sweeping pronouncement of that the day has come when blacks are unified and making progress as a race, a stellar accomplishment: “At last that blessed day has come/ And I don’t care where you come from/ We’re all movin’ on up (movin’ on up).” And, acknowledging the willingness of black people to sacrifice their lives (e.g., Martin Luther King, Malcolm X Medgar Evers) in the service of freedom to show the world that black people are unafraid to speak truth to power and to stand-up to power: “I don’t mind leavin’ here/ To show the world we have no fear/’Cause we’re a winner.”

Clearly, the black freedom movement produced the socially conscious commercial songs of the sixties. And reciprocally, the socially conscious commercial songs informed and infused the masses of black people with a new consciousness, reflected in the movement and in music of Sam Cooke and Curtis Mayfield. The songs of the 1960s, and more importantly the movement, point suggest what is to be done if black music is to return to its state of being a force for moral and social change.

Notes:

1. Frantz Fanon, The wretched of The Earth, Sekou Toure Address to the Second Congress of black Writers and Artist
2. 2. Gerri Hirshey, Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music
3. 3. Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing In The Street: Motown and The Cultural Politic of Detroit
4. 4. Craig Werner, Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
5. 5. Kwanzaa Guide, website on African American culture and history with a special emphasis on the African American holiday Kwanzaa.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were the defining figures of the 1960s black freedom struggle. These two towering leaders influence and determine the scope and tone of the civil rights struggle and black power movement. Through their philosophy and leadership, they set the moral and social agenda for much of the second half of the twentieth century, laying the foundation for a more democratic society and the election of Barack Obama as the 44^th President of the United States. Martin achieved his bona fides in the South and Malcolm achieved his in the North. Ironically, the year, 1965, which the civil rights movement reached its zenith with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, saw the ascendency of Malcolm X and black nationalism as the philosophy and practice informing the black freedom struggle. Conversely, King’s influence and statue started to spiral downward.

Though Malcolm and Martin differed in their approach to attaining freedom for African Americans, their critique of American racism, society, and policy worked synergistically to break the legal and ideological hold of white supremacy on American society, while at the same time transforming blacks and other progressive people into a force for social change. It would surprise most to know that King’s sermon for Sunday April 7, 1968 was entitled Why America May Go To Hell. It would surprise many to know that King questioned if black would be able to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial: “It [Declaration of Independence] has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our [black] lives.” And, it would shock almost all to know that King supported strategic black separatism:

When we see integration in political terms, then we recognize that there are times when we must see segregation as a temporary way-station to a truly integrated society. There are many Negroes who feel this; they do not see segregation as the ultimate goal. They do not see separation as the ultimate goal…I must honestly say that there are points at which I share this view. There are points at which I see the necessity for temporary segregation in order to get the integrated society.

King was an integrationist and promoted and practice nonviolence, and advocated civil rights. On the other hand, Malcolm was a black nationalist, espoused use the use of violence in defense of blacks and freedom, and advocated human rights. Yet, understanding and appreciating the achievements of the 1960s and the expansion of democracy as a result of the ‘60s struggle, requires seeing the contributions of Malcolm and Martin as one, and that the two of them are “related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements-complements in one necessary and symmetric whole.”

Malcolm and King Speak

As reflected below, by the mid-sixties, the worldview Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were very similar, and they were in agreement on many of the major issues of their day. In fact, during the historic Selma March, Malcolm told Coretta Scott King, “I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.” Hence, Malcolm and King were actually orbiting towards each other, perhaps toward an operational unity- unity in diversity.

By the mid-1960s both Malcolm and Martin believed that social conditions in the black ghettoes, punctuated by poverty and behavioral ills, had reached a tipping point and that blacks were less hopeful that they would experience the American dream.

The night before he was murdered King warned, in his famous “I See the Promised Land” speech in Memphis, “if something isn’t done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.”

And Malcolm warned, “1964 threatens to be the most explosive year America has ever witnessed. Why? It’s also a political year. It’s the year when all of the white politicians will be back in the so-called Negro community jiving you and me for some votes. The year when all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community with their false promises, building up our hopes for a letdown… As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion.”

A Dream Deferred

In 1963, King inspired the nation and elevated the hopes of black people with his I Have A Dream speech, considered speech of the twentieth century. By 1965, black people were weary of King’s dream.  Poet Langston Hughes articulated the sentiment of most black people in his poem, A Dream Deferred.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun

Or does it explode [like a Watts Rebellion]

In August 1965, the most fearsome urban violence in U.S. history broke our in the predominantly black area of black people in Watts in Los Angeles. According to the author of Freedom is Not Enough, James T. Patterson, the Watts rebellion was a “disaster for the morally powerful, interracial, nonviolent civil rights movement King and other had succeeded in shaping into a luminous force for racial justice…Many white Americans began to reconsider their views of black people-not as cruelly segregated, long-suffering southerners, but as violent out-of-control ghetto dwellers.”

In “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” broadcast on Christmas Eve 1967 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as part of the Massey Lectures, King acknowledged, just as Malcolm had long concluded “that not long after talking about” the dream in Washington, “I started seeing it turn into a nightmare.” He spoke of the nightmarish conditions of Birmingham, where four girls were murdered in a church bombing a few weeks after his speech. He spoke of the punishing poverty that he observed in the nation’s ghettoes as the antithesis of his dream as were the race riots and the Vietnam War.

Juxtapose to King’s Dream was Malcolm Nightmare. Malcolm saw the underbelly of King’s Dream, the lived experience of everyday black people struggling to find meaning in America as the “unwanted:”

I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver — no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

Race and Racism

As mentioned above, 1965 was a turning point for liberalism and race relations between blacks and whites. Both Malcolm and King began to rethink their position on race and race relations, bring them closer together on race. Malcolm said, I say again that I’m not a racist, I don’t believe in any form of segregation or anything like that. I’m for the brotherhood of everybody, but I don’t believe in forcing brotherhood upon people who don’t want it. Long as we practice brotherhood among ourselves, and then others who want to practice brotherhood with us, we practice it with them also, we’re for that. But I don’t think that we should run around trying to love somebody who doesn’t love us.” However, politically and strategically, Malcolm opined, “Whites can help us, but they can’t join us. There can be no black/white unity, until there is first some black unity.”

King on the other hand began to have a more pessimistic view of whites and race relations, lamenting, “the fact is that there has never been any single solid determine commitment on the part of the vast majority of white America…to genuine equality for Negroes…most Americans are unconscious racist.”

On Violence and War

Both Malcolm and King believed that America was the greatest threat to peace in the world. In his speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, King admonished America, stating, God didn’t call American to do what she’s doing in the world today. God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war [such] as the war in Vietnam.” In this same speech he went on to say that America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Similarly, Malcolm believed that America was a war criminal.  Uncle Sam’s hands are dripping with blood, dripping with the blood of the black man in this country. He’s the earth’s number-one hypocrite. He has the audacity — yes, he has — imagine him posing as the leader of the free world… Let the world know how bloody his hands are. Let the world know the hypocrisy that’s practiced over here.”

Elsewhere, he asserted “If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it’s wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it’s wrong for America to draft us and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”

Malcolm and Martin: In Unity and Struggle

In short, examining the worldview of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King at there most developed and mature stages, makes clear that these two leaders and thinkers were positioned to unite the two tendencies in the black freedom struggle-moderate civil rights and radical black nationalist movements. What is instructive is not to see Malcolm and Martin as antagonist or polar opposites, but as two leaders who disagreed on method, but were in agreement on the outcome. “Our people have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods, or tactics, or strategy.”

Malcolm expressed and articulated his concept of black power through philosophy and practice of black nationalism:

Political philosophy: black people should control the politic and politicians in their community. Malcolm believed that the “black man in the black community has to be re-educated into the science of politics so he will know what politics is suppose to bring him in return.

Economic philosophy: black people should control the economics of their community. As Malcolm asserted, 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. Then you wonder why where you live is always a ghetto or slum area”

Social philosophy: black people should unite to eradiate social ills in their communities’ such as drugs and crime and build vibrant and model communities. Malcolm argued that this philosophy instructed African Americans to work together and “remove the evils, the vices, alcoholism, drug addiction and other evils that are destroying the moral fiber of our community. We ourselves have to lift the level of our community, the standard of our community to a higher level, make our society beautiful so that we will be satisfied in our own social circles and won’t be running around here trying to knock our way into a circle where we are not wanted.

Thus, it was this philosophy of black nationalism which became the foundation concept and practice of black power after Malcolm death. Embedded in his philosophy was commitment to the practice of the three goals of black power: self-respect, self-determination, and self-defense.

Malcolm X strongly believed that African Americans could only achieve self-respect through grounding their identity in Africa. He asserted, “if we migrated back to Africa culturally, philosophically and psychologically, while remaining here physically, the spiritual bond that would develop between us and Africa through this cultural, philosophical and psychological migration, so-called migration, would enhance our position here, because we would have our contacts with them acting as roots or foundations behind us.” Further, he added, “when the African continent in its independence is able to create the unity that’s necessary to increase its strength and its position on earth, so that Africa too becomes respected as other huge continents are respected, then wherever people of African origins, African heritage or African blood go, they will be respected.”

Closely related, Malcolm argued that self-respect demanded that black people be willing to defend themselves. He especially castigated black men for not being more assertive in defending the rights of black people, declaring, “in areas where the government has proven unwilling or unable to defend the lives and the property of Negroes, it’s time for Negroes to defend themselves.” Underscoring the contradiction of black men fighting for American abroad, but being nonviolent in the face of violence at home, he stated: “if violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us and make us violent abroad. And if it is right for America to draft us ,and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”

Third, a theme that runs constantly through Malcolm’s black nationalism and is core to the concept and practice of black power is self-determination.  Malcolm asserted “one of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you think you are going east, and you will be walking east when you’re going west…the most important thing we can learn to do today is think for ourselves.”

To be sure, the 1960s black power movement and its advocates were heir to Malcolm X and his black nationalism philosophy. The call and infusion of black power into the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality and other community and regional based organizations was the fruits of Malcolm’s effort to imbue a spirit and practice of black nationalism into the freedom movement. Proponents of black power drew inspiration and instruction from Malcolm’s philosophy and courageous representation and advocacy of black power.