James Cone's Martin & Malcolm & America

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X have often been portrayed as polar opposites: King as the wise, pacifist civil rights leader and Malcolm as the angry, violent, black supremacist revolutionary. James Cone's book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare challenges that portrayal, arguing that although there were significant differences between the two men, they should not be placed in opposition to each other (316). Cone sees their visions as complementary, argues that they served as correctives for one another, and suggests that Malcolm’s radical rhetoric was probably a major factor in causing white Americans to be accepting of King, who they saw as the less dangerous alternative (246, 64). Before Malcolm rose to national prominence, King had been dismissed by many whites as too radical, especially because he was mixing religion and politics (136-142). But as Malcolm got more media coverage, whites began to see King as a sober moderate. Malcolm himself recognized this near the end of his life, and willingly played the role of the fiery revolutionary in order to help King’s agenda even though he was moving away from such rhetoric in his heart (267). And that’s the final reason that Cone wants to see these two men as complementary: because their ideologies moved toward each other as they got older, and when they died they seem to have had more in common than separated them (253-59).

Early in their careers, however, they were indeed quite different. These differences sprang to a large degree from their different backgrounds. King was the son of a southern black Baptist minister. His father was a prominent, prosperous, self-made man: a businessman and an activist who was optimistic about blacks’ self-worth and ability to better their circumstances, and who passed that optimism onto his son. Although King Sr. was a proud man who stood up for himself against white prejudice, he also taught his son to love whites rather than hating them (20-23). When King Jr. pursued his studies in the North, he met many whites who were perfectly accepting of him, which reinforced his father’s message. He came to see racism as primarily legal and structural rather than personal (26-32). King’s happy youth thus gave him good reason for dreamy optimism. He came to believe that racism was caused by simple ignorance and fear, and that the antidote was communication (36). All he had to do was prick the conscience of whites and remind them of Christian and American principles, and the problem would be solved (67).

Malcolm was the son of a black Baptist minister too, but that is where the similarity to King ends. Malcolm grew up in the North, where there were no Jim Crow laws but racism and racial disparity were still endemic. His father was a follower of the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, famous for the slogan “Back to Africa”. Malcolm was raised to be proud to be black. Unlike King, Malcolm’s youth was troubled, to say the least. His family was driven out of Omaha and their home burned down. His family was rent by domestic violence. His father seems to have been murdered. His family became so poor that they had to eat dandelion leaves, and Malcolm turned to theft to survive. His mother went insane, and white welfare agents divided the children and fostered them out to different homes (41-45). Because he lived in a white family and an integrated society, he was surrounded constantly by racism and racial epithets. He absorbed it all and began to despise himself (48). Eventually he found his way to the ghetto, where he became a hustler, dope-pusher, a pimp, and a thief. Only when he went to prison did he convert to the Nation of Islam, a “black” religion that gave him self-respect and taught him to see whites as devils. Only through the ideology of the Nation was he able to pull himself out of his misery and depravity and to make something of himself. He became a total devotee, and took the ideology entirely to heart. It described his experience. Whites had always acted like devils to him, and the results had been devastating (47-53). In a life so torn by violence, non-violence and love of enemies sounded absurd. But the doctrine that blacks had as much right to stand up and fight for their freedom as whites did was empowering (54-57). Malcolm was not an American—America was the enemy, and he wanted no part of it—but he appealed to Patrick Henry and George Washington as examples of men who fought and killed for freedom, and he felt that blacks would remain enslaved until they were willing to do the same (158-59, 261).

King’s optimism about white America led him to articulate a dream of interracial unity in which all would participate equally as humans and as Americans regardless of skin color (64-67, 72, 83-85). And in the pursuit of that dream he used nonviolent direct action: protests and boycotts designed to challenge the overtly racist legislation of the South (76-79). King’s dream and methods worked well in his context, but Malcolm’s context was very different. In the urban North there was no overtly racist legislation. Racism was structural and economic, deeply embedded in the fabric of society. Whites acted non-racist and said non-racist things, but blacks still formed a miserable underclass that was de facto segregated into ghettos and slums whose conditions were simply unlivable (221-24). Here non-violent direct action was not really practical, and the “dream” that whites’ consciences could be pricked was unrealistic (233). Blacks were effectively ignored by the white population, which happily thought of racism as a purely southern problem. If northern blacks wanted dignity and a better life, Malcolm believed they would have to stop depending on whites, and take matters into their own hands. Integration could only create dependence; blacks needed to separate so they could create their own dignity and identity without interference from the white devils (108-10).

Malcolm’s harsh language about whites raises the difficult question of whether he was a black supremacist who hated all whites. Malcolm himself of course vigorously denied this. He insisted that he was not anti-white but anti-evil, and that history showed that whites had acted in consistently evil ways. Nearly all of his rhetoric was framed in these historical terms. It was not individual white people who were devils, but the collective historical record of the white man. Collectively, the white man was responsible for the plight of blacks. On a personal level, he insisted, whites are not important enough to hate (100-104). For all his protesting, however, there does seem to have been something of a hateful undercurrent in Malcolm’s early thinking about whites. Although his vicious racial slurs may have indeed been designed to let whites know “how we feel,” as he claimed, it’s very likely that he really meant the things he said (96-97). The things he said, unfortunately, included a laughing statement that a train crash that killed 130 whites was “good news”, and a call for a new Mau Mau revolution in the United States (261-62, 302). His early hatred of whites, however, is a somewhat different question from that of “black supremacy”. Malcolm was a black separatist, not a black supremacist. He wanted independence from whites, not black dominance over them (108-10). Besides which, to a large degree his reversal of the color hierarchy was a theological statement. It was a statement that God is on the side of the poor and oppressed. And insofar as this is what Malcolm meant, his view was quite defensible (160).