The civil rights movement’s most prominent leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) and Malcolm X (1925–1965), represent two wings of the revolt against racism: nonviolent resistance and revolution "by any means necessary." This volume presents the two leaders’ relationship to the civil rights movement beyond a simplified dualism. A rich selection of speeches, essays, and excerpts from Malcolm X’s autobiography and King’s sermons shows the breadth and range of each man’s philosophy, demonstrating their differences, similarities, and evolution over time. Organized into six topical groups, the documents allow students to compare the leaders’ views on subjects including integration, the American dream, means of struggle, and opposing racial philosophies. An interpretive introductory essay, chronology, selected bibliography, document headnotes, and questions for consideration provide further pedagogical support.

Selected papers from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Conference on Civil Rights and Race Relations, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, October, 1993, emphasize the historical origins of the civil rights movement in the US. Other discussions comment on reactions and representations of the movement during the 60's and today, including comparative analyses of US and United Kingdom race relations, and a particularly interesting study of the similarities between the South African Defiance Campaigns of the 1950s and the non-violent US civil rights campaigns. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Long before the particular civil rights movement in the United States of America of the time of 1950s & 1960s had started making proper headlines, the response of the black community towards oppression as well as racial inequality was highly under its way. Definitely, as the failed emancipation’s promise in the latter half of the 19th century had given rise to the case of Jim Crow which was viewed as a series of customs and laws that were responsible for segregation and disfranchising of the black community – it was also responsible for compelling a group of individuals towards launching the efforts for asserting their respective constitutional rights and for improving their given standing in the community. Towards the turning of the century, for instance, the outspoken leader Ida B. Wells had grappled with the most major leading issues of the time: the lynching of the people belonging to the black community. Through a series of highly analyzed orchestrated attack on the journalist, Wells had almost brought the given form of violence that tended to be racial singlehandedly –this represented as the major trenchant symbolism of the supremacy of the whites –to the headlines of the consciousness of the nation. However, the others were still mobilizing the overall creation of the leading organizations that would be shaping and supporting the fights & movements for the given civil rights. Under this scenario, Marcus Garvey was responsible for forming the Universal Negro Improvement Association during the time of 1917 for the aim of promoting his contention with respect to the fact that the black community should be working towards self-determination: the idea that was responsible for prefiguring the overall power movement of the black community during the time of the 1960s. Similarly, during the time of the 1905, the man named W.E.B Du Bois and several other leaders had resulted into the formation of the famous Niagara Movement for addressing the black grievances. This had led to the immensely influential and reputed NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People) along with the legal assaulting of the given discrimination.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is widely celebrated as an American civil rights hero. Yet King's nonviolent opposition to racism, militarism, and economic injustice had deeper roots and more radical implications than is commonly appreciated, Thomas F. Jackson argues in this searching reinterpretation of King's public ministry. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, King was influenced by and in turn reshaped the political cultures of the black freedom movement and democratic left. His vision of unfettered human rights drew on the diverse tenets of the African American social gospel, socialism, left-New Deal liberalism, Gandhian philosophy, and Popular Front internationalism. King's early leadership reached beyond southern desegregation and voting rights. As the freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s confronted poverty and economic reprisals, King championed trade union rights, equal job opportunities, metropolitan integration, and full employment. When the civil rights and antipoverty policies of the Johnson administration failed to deliver on the movement's goals of economic freedom for all, King demanded that the federal government guarantee jobs, income, and local power for poor people. When the Vietnam war stalled domestic liberalism, King called on the nation to abandon imperialism and become a global force for multiracial democracy and economic justice. Drawing widely on published and unpublished archival sources, Jackson explains the contexts and meanings of King's increasingly open call for "a radical redistribution of political and economic power" in American cities, the nation, and the world. The mid-1960s ghetto uprisings were in fact revolts against unemployment, powerlessness, police violence, and institutionalized racism, King argued. His final dream, a Poor People's March on Washington, aimed to mobilize Americans across racial and class lines to reverse a national cycle of urban conflict, political backlash, and policy retrenchment. King's vision of economic democracy and international human rights remains a powerful inspiration for those committed to ending racism and poverty in our time.