The anniversaries of the assassination of Malcolm X on Feb. 21, 1965, and of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, will soon be commemorated. This week’s Books of the Month selection is from the Spanish edition of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. In the excerpt below, Barnes refutes claims of a convergence between two very different leaders of the Black rights movement in the U.S. It is from the chapter “Malcolm X: Revolutionary leader of the working class,” based on a talk given by Barnes in March 1987. © Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
[I]t is simply untrue to talk about a political convergence between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. King was a courageous individual who helped lead powerful mobilizations for Black rights, from the time of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 right up until his assassination in 1968. …We’re talking about two clashing class outlooks, two irreconcilable political courses.
One of the pieces of “evidence” displayed time and again to support the “Malcolm-Martin” myth is a photograph of the two of them together, smiling, after running into each other by happenstance at the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C., in March 1964 — just two weeks after Malcolm announced his break with the Nation of Islam. But there was no political content whatsoever to that chance meeting. As King himself later said in an interview with Alex Haley, “I met Malcolm X once in Washington, but circumstances didn’t enable me to talk with him for more than a minute.” And King went on in that same January 1965 interview to condemn what he called Malcolm’s “fiery, demagogic oratory,” charging that “in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice.”
That was Martin Luther King’s political assessment of the person who was arguably America’s greatest single mass revolutionary leader of the middle of the twentieth century.
The actual political relations between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were demonstrated a few months after their unplanned encounter, when King traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, in June 1964. King went there to support activists who had been repeatedly beaten by the Ku Klux Klan and arrested by cops for organizing lunch counter sit-ins and other civil rights protests. The Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson had contemptuously spurned King’s call for federal troops to protect the demonstrators and enforce their rights.
On behalf of the newly launched Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm sent a telegram to King at the time saying, “If the federal Government will not send troops to your aid, just say the word and we will immediately dispatch some of our brothers there to organize self-defense units among our people and the Ku Klux Klan will then receive a taste of its own medicine. The day of turning the other cheek to those brute beasts is over.”
King flatly rejected Malcolm’s offer, calling it a “grave error” and “an immoral approach.”
Nor did that political chasm narrow over subsequent months. In early February 1965, Malcolm spoke to a group of three hundred young people at a local church in Selma, Alabama. Since the beginning of 1965, King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had been leading voting rights demonstrations in and around Selma, in the course of which protesters had been subjected to cop brutality and some 3,400 had been arrested. After Malcolm had addressed a meeting of several thousand on February 3 at nearby Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, students there insisted that he go with them to Selma the next day, and Malcolm agreed. …
Malcolm respected and appreciated anyone who devoted their life to the fight against racism and for Black equality. He was ready for united action to advance common demands. But it’s simply false that Malcolm during his last year was converging politically with Martin Luther King — with King’s bourgeois pacifism, his social-democratic ideas, his commitment to the reformability of capitalism, his support for the imperialist Democratic Party and various of its politicians.
When he spoke to the young people in Selma, Malcolm again condemned the Johnson administration for its refusal to deploy federal troops to protect Blacks fighting for their rights. Malcolm said he was “100 percent for the effort being put forth by the Black folks here” and believed “they have an absolute right to use whatever means are necessary to gain the vote.” But he added that he didn’t believe in practicing nonviolence in face of violence by organized racist forces. He concluded: “I pray that you will grow intellectually, so that you can understand the problems of the world and where you fit into, in that world picture” — once again the internationalist starting point, “broadening your scope.” …
King, who was in jail when Malcolm was in Selma, said, shortly after the assassination: “I couldn’t block his coming, but my philosophy was so antithetical to the philosophy of Malcolm X — so diametrically opposed, that I would never have invited Malcolm X to come to Selma when we were in the midst of a nonviolent demonstration, and this says nothing about the personal respect I had for him. I disagreed with his philosophy and his methods.” …
So, no, there was not a “Malcolm-Martin” convergence during that last year. To the contrary, the divergence widened, as there was a clarification of Martin Luther King’s conviction that capitalism and its injustices could be reformed. Meanwhile, Malcolm never stopped advancing in his commitment to the need for the oppressed and working people of all skin colors, continents, and countries to join together in revolutionary struggle against the capitalist world order responsible for racism, rightist violence, the oppression of women, economic exploitation, and war.