Introduction
What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to accept, establish some kind of dialogue between those people whom I pretend have paid for the American dream and those other people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble. I want to say, at the end, the last, is that is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this room, and we are all, at least I’d like to think we are, relatively civilized, and we can talk to each other at least on certain levels so that we could walk out of here assuming that the measure of our enlightenment, or at least, our politeness, has some effect on the world.
James Baldwin1
When one thinks of the civil rights movement, no two individuals are more prominent than Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. While both played pivotal roles in the movement, many tend to think of them as entirely separate, fixed entities. The reality is that Martin and Malcolm both led complicated lives, and changed significantly over time in terms of their ideologies. Something that is often left out of the discussion on these two individuals is the ways in which their philosophies and ideologies began to converge later in their lives. While Martin is most associated with the black integrationist perspective and Malcolm the black nationalists, by the time both died they were far more similar than some might think. This is doubly true when considering the way they are expected to be taught in the U.S. History curriculum, as individuals who lived and worked in a vacuum, representing two distinct movements and ideologies. Historian and theologian James H. Cone argued that while Martin King saw America as “essentially a dream...as yet unfilled,” Malcolm X viewed America as a living nightmare. Despite this dichotomy, the two men had visions that were rapidly converging towards the end of their lives, and historically were often complementary of one another. How these ideologies complemented one another, sometimes converged, and the role they played in the scope of the civil rights movement will be the focus of this unit.
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