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When he returned he began following a course that paralleled King’s-combining religious leadership and political action. In the spring of 1964, Malcolm broke away from the NOI and made a pilgrimage to Mecca. “The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy,” Malcolm told an audience in 1963, “is the Negro revolution … That’s no revolution” (Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” 9). King never accepted Malcolm’s invitations, however, leaving communication with him to his secretary, Maude Ballou.ĭespite his repeated overtures to King, Malcolm did not refrain from criticizing him publicly. Although Malcolm was particularly interested that King hear Elijah Muhammad’s message, he also sought to create an open forum for black leaders to explore solutions to the “race problem” (Malcolm X, 31 July 1963). By the late 1950s, Malcolm had become the NOI’s leading spokesman.Īlthough Malcolm rejected King’s message of nonviolence, he respected King as a “fellow-leader of our people,” sending King NOI articles as early as 1957 and inviting him to participate in mass meetings throughout the early 1960s ( Papers 5:491). Shortly after his release in 1952, he moved to Chicago and became a minister under Elijah Muhammad, abandoning his “slave name,” and becoming Malcolm X (Malcolm X, “We Are Rising” ). Malcolm joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) while serving a prison term in Massachusetts on burglary charges. By the end of the 1930s Malcolm’s mother had been institutionalized, and he became a ward of the court to be raised by white guardians in various reform schools and foster homes.

Following his father’s death, Malcolm recalled, “Some kind of psychological deterioration hit our family circle and began to eat away our pride” (Malcolm X, Autobiography, 14).

His father died when he was six years old-the victim, he believed, of a white racist group. Malcolm Little was born to Louise and Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on. However, after Malcolm’s assassination in 1965, King wrote to his widow, Betty Shabazz: “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem” (King, 26 February 1965). Given Malcolm X’s abrasive criticism of King and his advocacy of racial separatism, it is not surprising that King rejected the occasional overtures from one of his fiercest critics.

As the nation’s most visible proponent of Black Nationalism, Malcolm X’s challenge to the multiracial, nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King, Jr., helped set the tone for the ideological and tactical conflicts that took place within the black freedom struggle of the 1960s.