Similarities Between Martin Luther King Jr And Malcolm X

History 131

Spring 2016

Dr. Robert Miller

David Howard-Pitney’s novel Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, discusses Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X and the noticeable similarities they developed in their last years of life. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X came from two very different backgrounds and at the beginning of their rise to fame, their contentions contrasted each other. It wasn't until many years of struggle that the two profoundly successful men realized that their power would be even more influential if they worked together. Martin Luther King Jr., the son of Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King, born on January 15, 1929, into a prominent middle-class

became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama at age twenty-six. This was also the time of the Brown decision and the bus boycott in Montgomery, that began after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person. In 1957, three years after the bus boycott began, King and other African American leaders, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Their objective was to organize civil rights groups using nonviolent actions and peaceful protests across the South. King traveled around the country, raising money for SCLC and gaining support for African Americans’ equal rights cause. As a leader of the American social movement against racial discrimination and inequality, King put his life in danger, risking prison, injury and

was Malcolm Little, the son of Earl and Louise Little, born in 1925 in Omaha Nebraska. His father a Baptist preacher, and an organizer for Marcus Gravey’s black nationalist organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). According to he UNIA, “stressed black pride and independence, separation from whites and an internationalist Pan-African identity among blacks everywhere” (Howard-Pitney 6). The Little family was often harassed by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups because of his father’s unreserved support for black independence. When Malcolm was four years old, his home in Lansing, Michigan was burned down and two years later his father was murdered. Malcolm had many siblings and his mother did her best to support the family on her own, but during the Great Depression of the 1930s she( barely managed.) Eventually it became to much and they were forced to go on public relief, Louise became mentally unstable and after a serious mental breakdown in 1939, she was admitted into a mental hospital. Malcolm was separated from his siblings and (forced) to live in white foster homes and attend (mostly) white schools, until the end of eighth grade. When he was about fifteen, Malcolm moved to Boston to live with his sister and that was when his criminal life began. He was a “predatory hustler who pimped, peddled, illicit drugs and alcohol, ran gambling, and generally did anything he could to gain money or