The Civil Rights Activists

In the 20^th century, many African Americans were participating in the Civil Rights movement. However, many of them had different ideas about precisely what rights or other benefits they wanted or how they would try to get them. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were ardent Civil Rights activists, but had very different ideas about the movement, and different methods of achieving their goals.

Michael Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. In 1935, his father, a Baptist minister, changed both of their names to Martin to honor Martin Luther, who founded the Protestant Church. In 1948, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Morehouse College in Georgia, and in 1951, he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary. He received his PhD at Boston University, and also met his future wife Coretta Scott there. Martin Luther King Jr. was greatly influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s ideas of nonviolent civil disobedience and Mohandas Ghandi’s ideas of “passive resistance.” He used these ideas when planning protests and strikes to support the Civil Rights movement (Biography). Malcolm Little was born on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, Earl Little, was a Baptist speaker and a supporter of Marcus Garvey and his “Back to Africa” ideas. Before he was born in Omaha, the Ku Klux Klan had attacked the house because of Earl Little’s work with Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA. When Malcolm was born, his family moved to Milwaukee, and then Lansing. While there, a local hate society called The Black Legion burned down their house. Afterwards, his mother and father had very tense relations, his father often beating his mother (Malcolm X 3-4). In 1931, his father died, and Malcolm believed that he had been murdered since his “father’s skull, on one side, was crushed in,” and because there had always been hate groups after them (Malcolm X 9-11). His mother was declared insane in 1938, and the children split up and sent to foster homes (Malcom X 19-21). He turned to a life of crime, and was arrested and jailed.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister like his father and grandfather. In1947, King was ordained a minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In 1954, he “accepted the pastorale” of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama (Nobel Foundation). Along with the fact that he earned a Bachelor of Divinity in college, his religious history makes it quite apparent that he was a dedicated Baptist. Malcolm X became influenced by the ideas of the Nation of Islam while he was in prison. He learned of the ideas that everyone had originally been black, and among other things, that “the white man was the devil.” When he was released, he went to meet Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the group. He then changed his surname to X, representing the African family name that he could not know because of his slave name, Little (Malcolm X 172-203).