Today is Malcolm X Day. Why don’t we celebrate him like King?

During my teenage years, I came across “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” The Muslim leader’s name grabbed my attention, but so did the author’s: Alex Haley. My dad swore by “Roots” and what it meant to a generation of Black people.

A wave of conflicting emotions struck me when I read about biographer Jonathan Eig’s “alarming discovery” – that a quote from Haley’s January 1965 interview in Playboy Magazine in regards to King’s criticism of Malcolm X was fraudulent. I was saddened when I thought about previous claims of plagiarism attributed to Haley, along with the controversy that surrounded other Malcolm X biographers such as Manning Marable. Media outlets and schools treat King and Malcolm X as ideological rivals instead of two men in their 30s with the world and a movement on their shoulders.

Long before I knew of the radical similarities between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, their anti-capitalist perspectives, their religious roots, their urgent action toward human and civil rights, I sensed a mutuality between the two of them.

It is unfortunate that we don’t celebrate that mutuality as a country. Today is Malcolm X Day, and we should celebrate it with the same fervor and fanfare as we do Martin Luther King Day in January.

Eig’s discovery is a chance to refute the idea that their philosophies of justice for Black Americans are irreconcilable and in diametric opposition. We should honor them in revelry, not rivalry.

The two civil rights icons only met one time. A snapshot of the two men shaking hands offers a glimpse of what might have been had each not been assassinated, if they had had time to explore how their burning desires for Black life and liberation could fit together. It was fittingly taken during a Senate hearing for the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1964, as both men made an appearance to hear the debates. This meeting was the introductory point for “The Sword and the Shield,” a powerful biography from historian Peniel Joseph that notes the striking similarities between Martin and Malcolm. The title of the book, in and of itself, provides the allegory of a soldier’s necessary tools, with Malcolm providing offense and King remaining on the defensive.

As Joseph notes in the introduction, the two saw their roles reversed that fateful March day:

In Washington, Malcolm and Martin found their usual political identities inverted. Malcolm addressed reporters as a budding statesman – an unelected dignitary who identified his moral authority in the thousands of black faces in Harlem, “the black capital of America.” King made no such public claims of leadership; instead, he surveyed a tense national racial climate and declared the passage of the civil rights bill to be the only plausible mechanism that might prevent larger racial storms from engulfing the nation.

Joseph’s offering represents a modern-day interpretation of their shared revolutionary dynamic. There have been remarkable perspectives from theologians such as James Cone and historians such as David Howard-Pitney, and even a mutual friend of both Martin and Malcolm who rests in the annals of forgotten journalists.

One of those obscure commentators matriculated in my native Augusta. Louis Lomax, an alum of HBCU Methodist Paine College, was the first Black newsperson to appear on television.

He was also a provocateur, as evidenced in the title of his book: “To Kill A Black Man.” The tagline is the “shocking parallel in the lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.”

In an introduction dated just five days after King’s assassination, Lomax lamented that the two were not able to grow even stronger together in ideology:

Both died at a time of traumatic changes in their own public lives; Malcolm was edging away from his anti-whiteness in search of an accommodation with the ideas of Martin Luther King; and King announced that “Black is beautiful” as he sought an accommodation with the alienated black masses of the nation. The social critic cannot but theorize that had both men lived longer they possibly would have traversed 180 degrees to become as one.

I wonder how Lomax might have felt about the recent controversy with Haley. The former mentioned in the acknowledgments of “To Kill A Black Man” that “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” “is, without doubt, the best biographical account ever written by an American black man.” Haley mentioned Lomax in 1983 as he reminisced about his experiences with Malcolm:

The late author Louis Lomax and I used to laugh about how we didn’t discover until much later that once Malcolm had visited and given each of us interviews in different rooms in the same hotel, with never a mention to either about the other, although he knew well that Lomax and I were good friends.

I can’t help but review the friendly banter between Haley and Lomax and wish Martin and Malcolm had the same opportunity to laugh and learn from each other. As it turned out, the icons nearly crossed paths again almost a year later in Selma. Another Paine alum was prominent in the organizing effort. Silas Norman, a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Project Director in Alabama, helped to bring Malcolm to Selma in February of 1965. A memorial on the SNCC site for Norman, the brother of famed opera singer Jessye, mentioned how Silas also chaired the Paine College Steering Committee.

Malcolm came to Selma in support of Martin and famously met with Coretta Scott King in a dialogue that was adapted in the movie that shares the same name as the iconic civil rights town. 

“Allow me to be the alternative to your husband. The alternative that scares them so much they turn to Dr. King in refuge,” said Malcolm, who was played by Nigel Thatch. “Let my being here, Mrs. King, represent the factions that will come if they don't give the good reverend what he's asking for and soon.”

Malcolm was assassinated just two weeks after he met with Coretta. King called his murder a “great tragedy”:

The American Negro cannot afford to destroy its leadership. Men of talent are too scarce to be destroyed by envy, greed, and tribal rivalry before they reach their full maturity. Like the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, the murder of Malcolm X deprived the world of a potentially great leader. I could not agree with either of these men, but I could see in them a capacity for leadership which I could respect and which was only beginning to mature judgment and statesmanship.

King also expressed disappointment that Malcolm’s death occurred at a time when the Muslim leader was “reevaluating his own philosophical presuppositions and moving toward a greater understanding of the nonviolent movement and toward more tolerance of white people generally.” His perspective captured nonviolence in a universal sense and, with the acknowledgment of both Lumumba and Malcolm, outlined the global Pan-African struggle for Black liberation.

As Malcolm was inspired by the likes of Lumumba and former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X’s death changed Martin. There is a present, actionable shift in King, which leads to strong anti-war and anti-capitalistic stances. Much like Malcolm’s struggles with the NOI, King’s shining star frustrated leaders who wanted a more prominent role. King weighed and waxed poetic over the power of Blackness in phrasing, such as “Black power” and “Black is beautiful.” And then, just three years after Malcolm’s assassination, King was abruptly taken from us as well.

A few years back, I bought a shirt from Philadelphia Printworks with the faces of Martin and Malcolm fused together. I wear it proudly in honor of their mutuality and their stewardship. Despite the uniqueness of their religious roots, they nonetheless provided a revolutionary ministry in the service of humankind. My hope is that we pick up their shared struggle with the fierce urgency of now.