Learn more about the civil rights era by looking at MLK and Malcom X, how they were similar and different.
Transcript: Civil Rights: MLK and Malcolm X.
Will: I often think about what would, if any, the relationship, you know, have developed between King and Malcolm X, if the two of them had lived longer and rather than being assassinated. Because there seems to have been something of a potential convergence and the lines that we often draw, you know, -- King as one approach. Malcolm X as another approach--those things were converging in the mid to late 1960s.
Penny: Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All project, supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All Project of Calvin University. In today's episode, we're talking again about Race in America and our focus for today's episode is actually to explore a little bit some of the figures that were important in the civil rights movement. I'm interested in particular in talking about MLK, Martin Luther King Jr., which everyone knows, but also about Malcolm X and how they were similar and different, how their takes on the civil rights movement and era were different. And just in a way to understand that era and the civil rights movement a little bit better. I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit first about MLK and some of the things that you feel are most important for us to know about him, his motivations, and how important he was to the movement.
Eric: Well, I think one thing about Martin Luther King is to recognize his context. Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta, the Auburn Auburn neighborhood of Atlanta. His father was prominent pastor. Ebenezer Baptist church there in Atlanta. His grandfather, his mother's father was also a pastor. And so King's approaches, he went to Morehouse College. He began at the age of 15. So he went on to seminary in Rochester, New York, and then the Boston University, where he got his Ph.D. So we have to understand King in that in that context, a rising African-American middle class in Atlanta, but also he is steeped and grounded in the African-American church, specifically the African-American Baptist Church. He was scholarly, but he's also an activist. He borrowed from Gandhi. And I think most people will say that who study King a little bit will say he borrowed from Gandhi, but really King entered into that that arena through Howard Thurman. Who had actually went to India and learned the principles of nonviolence in that context and brought that back to the United States and among some of his disciples, including Martin Luther King, as well as Coretta Scott King. So, there's a through line from Howard Thurman, Howard Thurman's connection to the nonviolent movement in India to both Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King.
Penny: When people talk about the civil rights movement, the person they really focus on is Martin Luther King Jr., it seems to me. But Malcolm X was also really important during this time period. And I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit and talk about what role he played in the civil rights movement and how he saw himself inside the civil rights movement.
Eric: Malcolm is larger than life, especially for people from my generation, hip hop generation, but we really look at Malcolm's life and legacy and his notoriety at the time, it was short because. What he he he's assassinated in 1965. He's on the scene really in the late 50s. Once he becomes the special assistant to Elijah Muhammad in the Nation of Islam. So there's some real different things that are coming out from Malcolm. Number one, he's born and raised in the north. He's born in Omaha, Nebraska. His family moved to Milwaukee for a little bit, but he's raised in the Lansing area. Right. Right down the road, Lansing, Michigan. His father was a minister, Baptist minister, but also a Garvian. He believed in the ideology of Marcus Garvey. So, Africa for the Africans and black self-help, that that that sort of ideology. And a white terrorist group kidnapped him and placed them on train tracks and he was dismembered. And after that, you know, Malcolm's life spiraled, the downward state gets involved and taking children away from Malcolm's mother because she she basically had a mental breakdown. I mean, that was a traumatic event for for for a mother who raising a number of children at the time. And Malcolm experiences this this acute northern racism where he's called the N-word in class. He's like, not going to school with the black kids, he’s going to school white kids, and they treat him like a mascot because he sees only black kids in his class out in Mason, Michigan, which is just South Lansing. He’s circumscribed in the sense that there's one incident where this teacher, Malcolm confides in the teacher: yeah, I want to become a lawyer. He really didn't want to become a lawyer, but his teacher is going around the classroom. What do you want to be …what do you want to be. Malcolm just says, Look, I didn’t think about it much. I just said lawyer. And the teacher’s like, oh, come on, that, Malcolm, that, you know, people like you don't become lawyers. Think think about something else. And eventually Malcolm moves out of Lansing and goes to Boston where he gets to become a petty thief and and then moves to New York and really becomes part of a New York underworld. And eventually he goes back to Boston where he's arrested. He winds up in jail, prison. That's just where he has this change, where he he sees he received the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who was the head of the … of the Nation of Islam. And that's just how Malcolm gets into the nation, but also how his brother’s brother’s in the nation as well. So it's it's not to the late fifties until Malcolm is on the public stage. And really, he's articulating what Elijah Muhammad believes about Black folks being a separate nation within the nation. So there's there's that black nationalistic strand there and in in the nation of Islam’s ideology. And the nation, they're not interested in voting. They're not interested in civil rights as what's going on in the broader African-American community. They basically want to be left alone so that they can help themselves and build their own type of community in the United States. They're not even thinking about leaving the country like Marcus Garvey advocated back in the teens and 20s. So Malcolm is is articulating those ideas. But at the same time, he's he's critical of of the practices of the United States that have historically oppressed African-Americans. So it’s that expression that pulls him into the broader type of civil rights expressions going on during the late 50s and early 60s.
Penny: So I have a couple questions. I'm wondering if you can help me understand. Malcolm X and The Nation of Islam. They're kind of advocating for a black nation within the United States or sort of an own identity. Why is that so dangerous or perceived as so dangerous by the people who are in power at the time.
Eric: They perceive it as dangerous because his organization and, mind you, it is a small organization at the time with a clear sense of identity, a clear ideology. But they are basically want to go. They don't want to go it alone. So getting from out and under white dominance. And that's deemed as dangerous. People call with the na… with the nation's ideology. ..They call it reverse racism to have independent group of black folks that was seen as dangerous and very suspicious.
Penny: Just the idea that black folk wanted to be out, as you said, from underneath the dominance of white folks was seen as dangerous. And actually, that's part of what was the danger in some people's eyes of the civil rights movement, also of the Martin Luther King version of the civil rights movement is that Black people out from under the dominance or control of white people would be would be dangerous for the country was kind of one of the fears, I would say, of that time period.
Eric: Yeah, it would have been it was considered subversive.
Penny: Hmm.
Eric: Ergo, Martin Luther King being called a communist.
Penny: Mm hmm. I have a second question about the nation of Islam. So it's called the nation of Islam. But what is its connection actually to Muslim beliefs or Islam as a religion?
Eric: The name. what They… Islam being in the name. And I mean, they do uphold… they did and do uphold the Qu’ran as their holy book, because a nation just doesn’t come out of a vacuum. The nation comes out of teaching from Noble Drew Ali, his Moorish science temple in the 19-teens coming out of Newark, New Jersey and then spreading around. And Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish science temple, which still is still in existence today, believe that people of African descent were a separate creation from everybody else. And that belief evolves into what Elijah Muhammad, who became the second leader of the Nation of Islam, taught about white people being invented by a mad scientist. And so that white folks are devils. That's very different from what you would read about in Qu’ran and what and what Muslims say Orthodox Muslims in this conversation. What Orthodox Muslims would believe. So it's very much from the Moorish science temple.
And the Nation of Islam ./ those teachings are very much grounded into African-American experiences in the United States, really in the diaspora, from the transatlantic slave trade to the experiences of enslavement, to the experience of second class citizenship throughout the country. Those teachings are a direct response to that. So it sounds outlandish, but when you understand the context in its entirety here, I can see why black folks would be teaching this.
Penny: So the nation of Islam has some roots in Muslim, I would say less you call it, more Orthodox Muslim beliefs, but they also had sort of a set of beliefs that were unique to the nation of Islam and came out of their enslavement experiences.
Eric: Yeah, but I would really hold loosely that the nation, at least then maybe somewhere between 20, 25 percent of the nation’s teachings could correspond to orthodox Islam, and I think I'm being generous on that.
Penny: OK.
Eric: I think I think what I think Will wants to chime.
Will: Well, what I was going to say is that we see some mirrored versions of something like this in some versions of racist Christianity. White racist Christianity. There are some unorthodox strains that argue that white people are the children of Adam and Eve and that people of color, if I remember right, are children of a devil or, you know, evil things and Eve, I think. And I think that so it's a way of theology using racial differences and weaving into them a racial and indeed racist vision. If you frame that in a broader context, then one of the things you can see is that the kind of black nationalism racialized with someone like Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam is a mirrored response to the ideologies of white Christians.
Eric: Yes, yes, yes.
Will: I don't know if it's the irony or the tragedy or it's just inevitable that that when you tell the people, that they are distinct and different and unwanted and that, you know, the real Americans are white and that they need to be separate. Well, it's not surprising that they're going to seek their own positive vision for themselves. You find more mainstream expressions of that in black nationalism in the 1960s and you find more, I don't know, sectarian or, as you said, just strange and quirky versions like like the Nation of Islam.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah.
Penny: How did MLK and Malcolm's approach to the civil rights movements in the sixties, How were they really different from each other?
Eric: I think they were different in the sense they say. Early, early 60, 60s snapshot of of their approaches and ideas. Yeah, Malcolm Malcolm was not interested in, you know, getting the right to vote or at least have legislation that would say that would remove all the restrictions from from African-American voting. Malcolm was not interested in integration at all. He was distrustful of the American power structure because of what of his history, of anti-black racism. So he wasn't. He wasn't aspiring to any of those things, whereas…. In the King movement, they were smart not to integration in some kind of pipe dream, but again, to remind the country: these are the promises that you've made in these founding documents. Now, African-Americans are included in that because of 13, 14, 15 amendments. Make good on these promises. So for King, it was it was both political. It was also moral as well. And I think that's that those are two differences. And then you throw in King's approach. His non-violence approach was another divergence. Now. Now, I don't want anybody to think that I'm arguing that Malcolm was this promoter of violence, that he was not. He was definitely not. Malcolm believes in self-defense. He was actually he didn't argue for people in the nation or any African-American to provoke violence. But if violence was perpetrated against them, that people had every right to to defend themselves. So that that was a difference, because King is just the the the non-violent movement. But even if violence is perpetrated against you, do not respond violently. So I, I think, though, those are like major areas of difference.
Will: What's interesting and fascinating to me about Malcolm X is that when he makes his pilgrimage to Mecca, he comes back a changed man, more orthodox in his Islam, but also and probably as a result of that, or at least in part a result of that, thinking more across racial lines. I was wondering if you could say a bit about that.
Eric: I think this is all drawn from his his autobiography and really just everything we know about Malcolm comes from the autobiography and now some of the scholars of scholarship now built upon that. But yeah Malcolm goes, he makes makes the Hajj, he makes a pilgrimage to Mecca. And he was astounded even before he gets to Mecca, he stops in Egypt. And he was astounded by the hospitality of people who were not black First, he encounters that in Egypt and then he encounters that in in in Mecca. And he's drinking from the same cup as white Muslims. And yeah, he's transformed. If he is to be true to Islam, then he cannot hold to the black nationalism that was espoused by Elijah Muhammad. So he ceases to argue that White people are the devil. He modifies it, he says, some are. He said so some some act devilish. But he doesn't say that that all white people were created by this devil mad scientist. He wants to look at individual cases and that sort of thing. Yeah, that changes him. And from there, he leaves. He leaves the the nation, although he's really forced out of the nation because of the statements regarding a president. Well, in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, he’s silenced and censored by the nation. He really never comes back. That shift, though. Make it allows them to think in more broad universal terms about human rights and not simply civil rights.
Will: Something that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King share is a faith in a God who is a God for all people and for Malcolm X through Islam, for King, it's through Christianity. But they're both Abrahamic religions. And they both… their very nature entails a kind of universalism, not one that totally ignores ethnic or racial differences, but says that faithfulness to God trumps those differences.
Eric: Right, right, right, right.
Penny: And I know that other people have pointed too to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschell, who was part of that famous march in Selma and was a proponent and stood beside Martin Luther King Jr. at different occasions for civil rights for all Americans. And how, you know, another Abrahamic tradition there where his faith, the the rabbi's faith is what really prompted him to be involved, and he has this kind of famous, quote, I'm not going to get it exactly right, but basically he talks about when he was marching with Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movements that his feet were praying. So it's very much linked to his faith as well.
Will: Our discussion here is a good reminder that when we think about religion and race, they don't lead necessarily in one direction or another. What religion is, is very powerful. It it leads to a strong racial identity for some Christians and validates it or in the case of the nation of Islam, for some African-Americans who put off Christianity and take on this, this unorthodox Muslim identity, but the religious faith and commitments validate racial differences, whereas others they promote cross-racial and cross-ethnic connections.
Eric: And what's interesting, though, even even with that, King was was not hesitant to call out fellow Christian clergymen in this case, clergymen with with the letter from Birmingham jail where he directly responds them who said that, yeah, he was being rash by the campaign in Birmingham and that you should basically move slow. And King was adamant against moderate Christian clergymen who wanted to go slow. Delay. And in the letter he mentions that when people say delay it almost means you know never, you know, so he couldn't you just could say, OK, I'll just take a little crumb here. A little crumb there. No. So he was very adamant against that approach, even coming from. And these were white clergy from Christian traditions. And also he he made mention of some rabbis who were like, oh, this guy got to move slow. It’s not time yet. It was just move slow. Slow.
Will: Yeah. And that I guess that's the third thing religion can do is simply validate, you know, the current cultural and social status.
Penny: That's both the danger and the potential advantage of religion. Right. Is that it can …
Will: yes.
Penny: You can kind of interpret. You could say it negatively and say twist; you to say positive, possibly say understand, with this perspective to support both unjust and just causes. For me, it's sort of inspiring to to to read King and that letter from the Birmingham jail to to look at his life and see how his faith in his God and the way he saw God in in other people, too. Right. That that really motivated him in all his work.
Eric: And I think also this would prove to be instrumental in his shift once the Voting Rights Act is passed in Sixty-five, King shifts his attention to issues of poverty. So really he’s getting into another area of systemic racism. And it's just not poverty for Black folks, it’s poverty generally, specifically poverty, that that isn’t just black experiences. And also he becomes more vocal about the United States involvement in the Vietnam War, which he also sees in terms of people who are going to war. A disproportionate number of black and brown men who are going into that war. So, the last few years of life, he’s really focusing on on those types of structural injustices.
Will: I often think about what would, if any, the relationship, you know, have developed between King and Malcolm X if the two of them had lived longer and rather than being
assassinated, because there seems to have been something of a potential convergence and the lines that we often draw, you know, King as one approach. Malcolm X is another approach. And those things were converging in the mid to late 1960s.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah, that's that's an excellent point. James Baldwin wrote that at the time that Malcolm was assassinated, he was coming closer to where King was. And by the time that King was assassinated, he was coming closer to where Malcolm had been. And Baldwin says that when King gave his last speech in in 1968, that Malcolm was one of the people he saw on the mountaintop.
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