ognition, largely because so much of it reflects white approval. He criticized King's receiving the Nobel Prize, stating it was a little like a general receiving a peace award before the war was over.
A generation after the death of these two men, the war for racial justice continues. Black Americans remain more likely than whites to be poor and jobless; to live in blighted neighborhoods; to suffer disease; to leave school or become pregnant or die prematurely; to go to prison and to die violently. In the late 1960s, when America's major cities experienced violent ghetto revolts, unemployment among young non-white males was roughly a third its present level. Malcolm X's anger at whites and civil rights leaders expressed the feelings of this group, both then and now. He died just as the focus of the movement shifted from the evils of legal segregation and disenfranchisement in the South to those of institutional discrimination and powerless nationwide.
Malcolm's Islamic and racially separatist creed and King's Christian non-violent campaign to achieve racial integration provided a dramatic contrast. Although King questioned the racial emphasis of the "Black Power" slogan in 1966, he had always sought empowerment. His public appeals to the conscience of white America had been a corollary to his promotion in local African-American communities of a collective activism rooted in each person's renewed sense of self respect. Both Malcolm X and Dr. King tried to nurture black self-esteem. Both were attracted to the idea of a divine mission for people of color.
Malcolm's non-southern inner-city constituency made the issues of unemployment, inadequate housing, schools and social services, and police brutality natural themes for his speeches. In this context, the racial division so essential to his Islamic Nation's philosophy overlay another divide of class. This has en
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