Malcolm X, the militant black Muslim leader, was in some ways the polar opposite of Dr Martin Luther King. Where King called for civil rights through peaceful protest, Malcolm X often advocated violence as the only means of forcing change on a reluctant American society. On a visit to the UK in December 1964, he told an audience at Manchester University that civil rights would be attained ‘by the ballot or the bullet’.
Malcolm X had been one of the key leaders of the Nation of Islam movement led by Elijah Muhammed, but after splitting from Muhammed in 1964 he established his own group, the Organisation for Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Lewis Nkosi, writing in the Observer, said the division would have ‘a far-reaching and possibly explosive impact on the civil rights movement in the United States’.
The split with the Nation of Islam was acrimonious. On 14 February 1965, Malcolm X, his wife and daughter escaped a firebomb attack on their New York house; the Nation claimed ownership of the property and had been attempting to evict him. Hella Pick wrote in the Guardian that ‘Malcolm X has no shortage of enemies’.
A week later, on 21 February, Malcolm X was attending an OAAU rally at a ballroom in Harlem, New York. As he stepped onto the podium to address the crowd shots rang out and he fell to the ground, fatally wounded. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of his murder in March 1966.
In a short piece the following day, the Guardian dubbed him an ‘apostle of violence’. Godfrey Hodgson, writing about his funeral in the Observer, said Malcolm X would be ‘mourned as a symbol and a martyr not only by a cross-section of fellow American Negroes, but by Africa and the Middle East as well.’
In a speech at the London School of Economics, published by the Guardian after his death, Malcolm X compared the involvement of white liberals in the civil rights struggle to ‘coffee which is strong and hot until you add cream and then it gets cooler and cooler until you don’t have any coffee.’ He also defined his notion of violent protest:
We are not for violence in any shape or form, but believe that the people who have violence committed against them should be able to defend themselves. By what they are doing to me they arouse me to violence. People should only be non-violent as long as they are dealing with a non-violent person. Intelligence demands the return of violence with violence.
