Comparing Malcolm X's El-Shabazz And The Black Panther Party

Extended Essay

Basil Abdelmonim, 11E

Research Question: To what extent were the methods of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the ‘National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’ more successful in furthering the rights of African Americans in the United States of America during and after segregation than those of El-Hajj Malik ‘Malcolm X’ El-Shabazz and the ‘Black Panther Party’?

This extended essay will be based in the academic subject area of history and will include numerous Theory of Knowledge likes. Narrowing the scope of the essay, I will be focusing specifically on the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States of America, occurring mainly in the 1960’s in the USA. I would like to compare the philosophies and

These statutes enacted by Southern states and municipalities, beginning in the 1886 and legalized segregation between blacks and whites. The Supreme Court ruling in 1896 in the widely covered Plessy v. Ferguson case that separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional encouraged the passage of discriminatory laws that diminished earlier gains made by African-Americans post slavery and during Reconstruction. Jim Crow Laws allowed for railways and streetcars, public waiting rooms, restaurants, boardinghouses, theaters, and public parks to be segregated, meaning that African-Americans and whites would not be allowed common use of these facilities. Schools, hospitals, and other public institutions, were also separated. Although the law stated that segregated facilities should be “separate but equal” this was not the case most of the time as African-American facilities were often second hand, neglected, or poorly maintained and facilities of inferior quality were usually designated for blacks. By 1913, even places of employment were segregated and Jim Crow Laws and segregation had become deeply ingrained in the culture of most of the Southern United

and Malcolm X appealed to largely separate audiences, used different approaches & strategies, and were at times campaigning for more or less dissimilar goals, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had a more profound and direct effect on the achieving of the overall goal of the larger African American population of the United States of America at the time. This goal was the complete desegregation of the country and the reversal of Jim Crow Laws that, although legally only separating African Americans from wider society, effectively created conditions in which African Americans living in the nation, particularly the Southern most states, were made second class citizens. Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to be more successful due the facts that he was able to appeal to American society as a whole as opposed to the specific focus Malcolm X had on appealing to African Americans. Martin Luther King was also less foreign and more easily digested by lawmakers and wider southern society due to his Christian upbringing, manner of presenting himself to the public, and his insistence an coexistence and