The obvious distinction between Martin and Malcolm almost does not need to be made. However, the nonviolence/violence dichotomy does not accurately depict the actual schools of thought in the struggle to achieve black subjectivity, nor does it allow for the type of evolution that we have already seen among the two thinker-activists. First, nonviolence does not imply that demonstrators are non-confrontational, or even the absence of violence. On the contrary, nonviolence is an aggressive passivity intended to incite a disproportionately violent response, exposing the morally bankrupt structure. This tactic – and many, including Martin, referred to it as a tactic – required an aggressive, courageous resistance. This method did not exclude the possibility of violence. As King himself wrote in 1958, “nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist…This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight.”
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Malcolm’s Islam was a symbolic and spiritual orientation to an Afro-Asiatic anti-colonial internationalism that struck a claim on politics outside the state’s monopoly of legitimate power. His transgressions, mental, criminal, and spiritual, are widely understood. But against Martin’s easy incorporation, we should remember that he, too, transgressed. It is true that the familiar and domestic language of Christianity of Martin made him acceptable to many Americans. However, couched in that language was the vernacular of a long tradition manifested in black liberation theology that signified on the master’s religion, developing a sometimes dormant, sometimes active opposition to white power. It is a lineage emerging from people like Richard Allen, who started the African Methodist Episcopalian Church in 1816 to create autonomy for black congregations. There are the likes of Henry McNeal Turner, an early “back to Africa” advocate and missionary who once said that “Hell is an improvement upon the United States where the Negro is concerned.” Turner’s own theology understood the symbolic power of the state’s gods:
“Every race of people who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much as other people?”
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