Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were the most influential leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that reshaped American society. Both were charismatic leaders whose purpose was to bring equal rights and a positive sense of black identity to African Americans, but their philosophies and methods differed. King believed in integration and the inclusion of whites into the struggle for black equality, and his method to achieve equality was through non-violence via civil disobedience. Malcolm X believed in black separatism and was an advocate of Black Nationalism, a more militant form of black identity in the United States that advocated self-defense against whites in which violence was acceptable; he later changed his thinking. Both men, however, sought to correct the many injustices done to African Americans. Both had strong roots in the black American experience, and their different outlooks on how to achieve justice and views of race relations can be traced to their early lives including their childhood, family expectations, education and early experiences.
King (born January 15, 1929) and Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little May 19, 1925) were both sons of preachers. MalcolmÆs father was a poor Baptist preacher and a follower of Marcus Garvey, the black leader who proclaimed that black Americans should return to Africa; he died when Malcolm was only six years old causing Malcolm to drift away from his family, ending up in foster homes and then reform school. KingÆs father, on the other hand, was a respectable, conservative middle-class preacher who passed on Christian values, such as brotherly love, to his son. As Stephen B. Oates points out in Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., King was brought up in a sheltered, middle-class black community. In contrast, Malcolm X had a traumatic, chaotic youth as related in his Autobiography, written with Alex Haley.
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