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The brief, and only, meeting between Malcolm X (1925-1965) and Martin Luther King (1929-1968), in the halls of the US Capitol, attending a Senate hearing on the Civil Rights Act, Washington DC, 26th March 1964.
Jonathan Eig, author of the new Martin Luther King Jr. biography, King: A Life, has discovered that the civil rights activist's famous criticism of his contemporary, Malcolm X, was misquoted.
Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous criticism of Malcolm X has been mostly falsified. Jonathan Eig, author of the new Dr. King biography King: A Life, discovered that the civil rights leader was misquoted in his 1965 interview with Alex Haley, who also wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
“And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice,” Dr. King was quoted as saying in the interview. “Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.”
However, upon exploring Haley’s archives at Duke University, an unedited interview transcript does not show that King said “… I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice,” nor does he say “… can reap nothing but grief.” Also, King’s “Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence…” was in response to a question earlier in the interview that reads “Dr. King, what is your opinion of Negro extremists who advocate armed violence and sabotage?”
Eig, who’s also written biographies on Muhammad Ali and Jackie Robinson, tells The Washington Post that Haley appears to have committed “journalistic malpractice.”
“We should remember that King was always more radical than we like to imagine or talk about,” Eig continued. “He was a Christian radical, and his radicalism came from a different place than Malcolm’s did, but they always had a lot in common. They always believed that you had to take radical steps to change America, to end racism, to create a country that lived up to the words of its promises.”
At 39 years old, X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, one month after the Playboy interview was published. Earlier this year, X’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the NYPD.
King: A Life releases May 16 via MacMillan Publishers.
