Competing Voices of the Civil Rights Movement

Martin Luther King, Jr. first came to national prominence through his leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56, which helped desegregate public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama. A gifted preacher and committed pacifist, King thought that non-violent, direct action against racial segregation provided the best means of securing the full integration of blacks into the mainstream of American life. As he wrote in his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," "I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek."

The connection between means and ends was not lost on a competing voice in the debate over civil rights—Joseph H. Jackson. The president of the National Baptist Convention from 1953 to 1982, Jackson argued that black Americans could not afford to use methods that would "substitute panic and anarchy in the place of law and order." In particular, Jackson thought that civil disobedience undermined the very goal of the Civil Rights Movement—the full protection of the law for all citizens. More constructive, less provocative, means should be pursued by black Americans to promote progress in a nation with a majority-white population. It was precisely the white population of America that Malcolm X took issue with in the years he served as chief spokesman for the Nation of Islam (sometimes referred to as the Black Muslims). Believing that blacks were God's chosen people, Malcolm X preached that they should separate from whites, who were destined for divine punishment because of their longstanding oppression of blacks. As he once remarked, "You don't integrate with a sinking ship." Whites had proven they were long on professing and short on practicing their ideals of equality and freedom, and so Malcolm X thought only a separate nation for blacks could provide the basis for their self-improvement and advancement as a people.