Martin & Malcolm

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
-- Fourteenth Amendement, United States Constitution (rat. 1868)

When we think about Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, most people think in contrasts: styles, messages, policies, religions, personal backgrounds, etc. But for me this misses the forest for the trees. In the end, these men were exactly the same in the most important way: they were both killed with the assistance of the United States government.

As Americans, and especially White Americans, we like to think back to Dr King and tell ourselves that his words contain some kind of eternal truth - that love wins, that men are all equal in the eyes of God, that we can provide for the needy, etc. We like these messages because they are soft - they don’t ask too much from us other than to imagine a better world and step into it. Hell, I personally like this rhetoric myself.

Contrast to Malcolm X, a formerly incarcerated Muslim convert whose experiences in America left him deeply suspicious of not just White society, but the State itself. His rhetoric was sharper, harder, and more acerbic, as were his policy recommendations, as was his personal background. Malcolm is having a bit of a re-come up this past decade or so, but overall, and especially for White society, his words and ideas are harder to hear much less understand because they aren’t gentle or nice: he feels we don’t like him, provides clear and sufficient evidence to demonstrate his point, and concludes that he doesn’t like or need us either.

In the end, the differences in style didn’t matter at all. Both men lived protesting the violation of their Constitutionally enumerated rights by the States of the United States, and if not killed directly by the State itself, were tailed, wiretapped, infiltrated and betrayed rather than protected by a federal government that passed the Fourteenth Amendment almost exactly 100 years prior.

When I consider the broader arc of history and the role these two men played in it, it’s hard to reconcile the reality of their experience with my personal beliefs as an American. On the one hand, both are rightly lionized as martyr heroes, having traded their own lives to represent a people being unfairly persecuted by their government.¹ On the other, what real choice did they have? Were these men born into America with any real right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness when their physical bodies were under constant threat of violence and their local governments were systematically denying them their liberty? It seems like a false choice to me, and I believe both men would likely have traded what they eventually became for the boring, comfortable, historically irrelevant life of their oppressors.

But again, the point is moot because both men were killed, both the preacher of violence and the preacher of non-violence. And that brings me to the larger and more important point I am trying to get at: when we talk about Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, it is too common to reduce the conversation to the men themselves when the conversation is actually about Power, and given this fact, the subtleties of personal style are more or less unimportant if not entirely irrelevant.

What we need to remember about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr is that they were, again, if not directly killed then absolutely not protected and likely ushered to their graves by the State for exercising the most fundamental American right: freedom of expression.

And what that brings up for me is: if the State will not protect the most basic right of its citizens as defined by the State itself, and will in fact use the power of the State to silence dissent, then what rights, if any, do citizens really have at all?²

And what that then brings up for me is: if the United States government is representative of its people, and we as a people accept a State that only-sometimes, only-when-it’s-easy protects the rights of its citizens, then what does that say about us, the American people?

And that is what Malcolm and Martin were really trying to communicate. That is the role they took on: to hold a mirror to American society and Clockwork-Orange us into looking not just at the surface level reflection, but to truly see ourselves for who we are as compared to who we claim to be. The theory being that could either man have broken through to the soul of their fellow countrymen, the empathetic response would forever change the course of our country for the better. Two different men, two different styles, same team.

Alas, the Alex DeLarge that is American society preferred them dead over looking in the mirror.

Footnotes

1. It turns out that the popular mythology about the original Pilgrims coming to America is largely false. They had fled to Leiden in the Dutch Republic ten years prior, where they enjoyed the religious toleration that the American education system teaches children was their primary motivator for leaving England. The truth is they left England because they were being persecuted by the state for their faith, landed in Leiden where they were safe, and then left the comforts of Leiden for another reason: money. I personally find this story to be much closer to what America has always been and grown to become than the wivestale I was told as a kid about a bunch of noble, innocent, and unfairly persecuted religious pilgrims arriving on the shores with eyes that had seen of the evils of the world and God’s love in their hearts. The rest of American history makes much more sense if the original settlers made their decisions for almost entirely economic reasons without any real consideration for God or the morality of their religious texts. ↩

2. Coup de grâce (pun intended): when we think back to January 6, 2021, and we look at what really happened, there were absolutely public safety laws broken and crimes committed for which perps should be held accountable, but if you broaden your lens’ scope, you should see the demonstrations that day as a form of political expression - the exact same type of political expression, even if you disagree with the message, that the Civil Rights movement relied upon to achieve progress. As a progressive myself, I was and remain distraught by the way with which we talk about the events that day. Too often, I hear liberals (and especially guilt-ridden White liberals) call for the persecution of their fellow citizens for exercising their Constitutionally defined right to expression with no real recognition that, under different cultural circumstances, they would be the equivalent of the angry whites trying to stop Ruby Bridges from going to school. ↩