2011

Logan A. Kirkland
Georgia State University

U.S History
Larry Grubbs, PhD

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES AND THE STRUGGLE

FOR EQUALITY:
NOTIONS OF GLOBAL OPRESSION, LIBERATION, AND PEACE IN THE
LATER RHETORIC OF MALCOLM X AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
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Logan A. Kirkland

U.S. History | Larry Grubbs, PhD

Georgia State, Spring 2011

Final Paper

1. How did Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. display a more international
perspective in their late periods?

The 1960s were an incredibly turbulent time in the history of America and the world—to

this decade, and the leaders who wrought it, we owe much change. The Civil Rights movement,

Black Power, the Nation of Islam, the National Farm Workers Association, second wave

feminism, the counterculture, Stonewall, Vietnam—this decade has more than its fair share of

events, and a plethora of influential personalities spearheaded the dominate culture of America

in a bid for transformation. Some of the most influential (and some of the equally notorious)

leaders in American thought and political action emerged within this period—Martin Luther

King Jr., Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, César Chávez, Betty Friedan, Ken Keasy, Timothy Leary—

the times they were a changing, as Bob Dylan told senators, congressmen, and the world’s

increasingly more modern public sphere.

Despite their influence, these were also the last days of the impeccably influential Dr. King

and Malcolm X. Each would meet their end at an assassin’s bullet before the end of the

decade—on April 4th 1968, King was shot on his hotel room balcony in Memphis, while Malcolm

met his fatal bullet around four years prior; on Febuary 21st, in New York City, during a speaking

engagement (Howard-Pitney 2004: 188-191). Yet even during their final days, these men were
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still growing, learning, and changing—in their ideas, their rhetoric, and their strategy for

defeating the dragon of racism. Increasingly, they both moved towards a more globalized

paradigm—one that was sensitive to the international reality of inequality, the ‘bigger picture’

of both America’s oppression, and the oppression throughout the world-- forged in the violent

fires of imperialistic and capitalistic greed (Howard-Pitney 2004: 21).

Dr. King felt it was his duty to lobby upon society for the ideals of peace. Throughout the

battle for Civil Rights, King had always espoused an almost Ghandian principal of non-violence,

and this continued—but King felt it was his duty to not only speak out against the racial and

economic violence (both direct and systemic) in America, but also against the violence

committed by the State in other arenas, and the greatest example of this was the war in

Vietnam (Howard-Pitney 2004: 92). “…injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…”,

King said (Howard-Pitney 2004: 123). He saw the war as a multi-fold tragedy—the enormous

number of Vietnamese lives thrown away, many of them peaceful peasants, elderly or perhaps

children; the lives of America’s working class soldiers also being thrown away, of all races, while

the elite avoided the draft; and America’s imperial mace of violence being swung on the world

stage in the first place in an attempt for change.

King truly believed in a radical notion—Just Give Peace a Chance. Thus, he came out as one

of the leaders most critical of the war (repeatedly, but especially in his in his 1967 speech

Beyond Vietnam), and in turn, many were critical of him for it. Other civil rights activists saw it

as a strategic mistake on King’s part—one shouldn’t play the foreign policy game when one had

yet to win the domestic policy game, they believed. Yet, despite these criticisms, King felt that
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peace and opposition to violence and oppression anywhere were his ultimate responsibility

(Howard-Pitney 2004: 138-147).

The contrast to this equation is Malcolm X’s final days—days in which he showed what is

certainly an enormous paradigm shift in both philosophy and strategy. His epistemic break of

sorts begins with his break with the Nation of Islam—first, they reprimanded him after he made

a negative comment to the news media after the assassination of U.S. President John F.

Kennedy; this began the fracture between Malcolm and the N.O.I. that would eventually

become a complete fissure. The second kink between Malcolm’s gears and the Nation’s

involved N.O.I.’s leader and alleged prophet at the time, Elijah Mohammad. Mohammad, it was

thoroughly rumored, abused his privilege as a leader extensively to have sexual relations with a

variety of secretaries and other women in the organization, possibly including one of Malcolm’s

former lovers. These themes, among others, eventually lead to Malcolm leaving the religion-

organization, and his conversion to orthodox Sunni Islam (Howard-Pitney 2004: 156-157).

Malcolm became a world traveler, and this was the next great catalyst in his impending

paradigm shift. He began by making the Hajj, the traditional Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (and

one of the five central pillars of Islam). Here he saw all different manner of people, of all races,

united in brotherhood under the auspice of the Muslim faith—and he realized that perhaps

interracial equality were not impossible, and perhaps not all white people were ‘white devils’ as

he had once believed (Howard-Pitney 2004:157-159), and as had been propagated as part of

the NOI’s pillars of faith. Thus, he rearranged his aim to be much closer in line with the classic

Civil Rights Movement to promote social justice and an egalitarian society. In Sincere Whites
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(That Coed Again), not long before his death, he articulated this as the main point: “True Islam

taught me that it takes all of the religions, political, economic, psychological, and racial

ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete”

(Howard-Pitney 2004: 160). While he still had certain tendencies toward a ‘Black Nationalism’

of sorts, he became open to the sincerity of White people to the plight of racial inequality—he

simply constructed his ideas of multi-racial strategies against these oppressions in a separated

sort of fashion, emphasizing individual solidarity (Howard-Pitney 2004 :164): “’Work in

conjunction with us—each of us working among our own Kind.’ Let sincere white individuals

find all other white people they can who feel as they do—and let them form their own all-white

groups, to work trying to convert other white people who are thinking and acting so racist. Let

sincere whites go and teach non-violence to white people!” (Howard Pitney 2004:161). He

encouraged black people and black communities to peacefully, yet with sociocultural and

political force, take their rights—to use the power of the vote to create change, despite still

being enormously critical of the system, he felt like fighting the system through the system was

one the greatest peaceful strategies available to black people.

“No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are victims of
Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are victims of democracy, nothing
but disguised hypocrisy…these 22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming
open. They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at…black people have a bloc of
votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who’s going to sit in the White House
and who’s going to be in the dog house.” (Howard-Pitney 2004: 167-168).

Each of these men shaped history with their powerful personalities, their incredible

charisma, their intelligence, and their dedication to fighting against oppression. To really

understand them, however, it is essential for our gaze to be carefully attuned to the context of
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History, and of each of their lived experiences. To understand them we must look at the picture

in the most whole sense possible, over the passage of time and through each of their paradigm

shifts. Their systems of thought and action were essential to constructing reality and history as

we know them, and to helping ease the grip of oppression on the world’s people—and we owe

them much for this. Their final messages were the products of lives filled with experiences—

both mistakes and triumphs; yet they both contributed to saving America from her own

heartless history. One of Malcolm’s final statements, My Voice Helped Save America, sums this

up appropriately: “…and if I die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth

that will help to destroy the racist caner that is malignant in the body of America—then, all of

the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.” (Howard-Pitney 2004: 178-178).

Indeed, despite the tragic destruction of both men, their dreams lived on, and both of them

contributed to the ongoing chemotherapeutic banishment of American racism.

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Works Cited

Howard-Pitney, David.

2004. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and
1960s: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford/St. Martin’s Press.