History of the United States II / Unit 14 USH2 1989 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
King and Malcolm X
The idea
King and Malcolm X are often taught as opposites, and their methods did diverge. King led a racially integrated, largely Protestant movement committed to nonviolence; Malcolm X, as a Nation of Islam minister, advocated armed resistance in self-defence and freedom by any means necessary. The Yawp calls him the radical alternative to King's approach.
In practice
The two men together at a press conference in March nineteen sixty-four, in a photograph the Yawp reproduces.
Where people slip
The misreading makes them enemies with opposite goals. The Yawp states the goal they shared: like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois before them, the two represented two styles of racial uplift with the same general aim of ending racial discrimination. Where they diverged was how to reach it, and Malcolm X's views, the anchor notes, changed somewhat after he left the Nation.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States II