To What Extent Did Malcolm X Offer Solutions to Racial Problems That Were Not Addressed by the SCLC?

Malcolm X did offer different solutions to racial problems that were not addressed by the SCLC and Martin Luther King. Indeed Martin Luther King formed the SCLC before Malcolm X became widely known throughout the United States due to his efforts in solving racial problems that would improve the quality of life for all African Americans. The main focus for Martin Luther King and the SCLC was upon dealing with racial problems in the Southern states a that is where the African Americans faced the greatest amount of legal blocks to achieving meaningful exercising their civil rights. The SCLC under the leadership of Martin Luther King concentrated the vast majority of its campaigning efforts to the removal of legally enforced segregation in the Southern states. Although the SCLC campaigned nationally to force the federal government into enforcing civil rights that had officially been granted as a result of the American Civil War. The Southern focus of the SCLC was understandable, yet Malcolm X thought it was the wrong way of solving racial problems across the whole of the United States. Malcolm X regarded the racial problems experienced by African Americans, as not been solvable by formally gaining legally protected civil rights across the whole country alone.

Malcolm X believed that the objectives, as well as the strategies of the SCLC did not completely address the racial problems encountered by African Americans living the United States. Malcolm X argued that the SCLC and Martin Luther King were unfortunately mistaken if they believed that the gaining of legal civil rights in the Southern states would magically make life free of racial problems for African Americans. After all in the Northern states, nobody had passed legislation equivalent to the Jim Crow laws enacted in the Southern states, yet African Americans in the North did not gain any better treatment from white Americans than their Southern counterparts. In the Northern states the constitutional amendments granting civil rights to African Americans had been enforced by the federal government, but racial discrimination was just as rife as in the Southern states. Informal discrimination in the Northern states as just as bas as the Jim Crow laws employed to deny civil rights to African Americans in the Southern states. Instead of concentrating solely upon removing the Jim Crow laws in the Southern states, Malcolm X recommended that all African Americans had to protest against the widespread racial discrimination directed towards them. The differing emphasis about how to tackle racial problems had a geographical cause, Malcolm X lived in the Northern states, whilst the SCLC and Martin Luther King were based in the Southern states. Malcolm X from his own experiences was aware that legally enshrined civil rights were not enough to solve racial problems.