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11/12/2008: "Obama and King had the right, passive, idea - and black separatists do not, says Times columnist"

I start with Malcolm X's miserable death, because I want it to be remembered in the week that an African-American went to the White House, preparing to move in. Barack Obama's victory has been widely reported as a victory for Martin Luther King. And so it is. But it is not just a victory for King over the White supremacists, and Democrats of the Jim Crow Deep South. It is also a victory for King over Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam argued that non-violence would never work, that it was cowardly. Blacks and whites could never live together, they said, and there would never be anything approaching equality. So they eschewed the Civil Rights Movement, banning members from political action and holding the jail marches in open contempt. They wanted segregation of their own, based on black pride. And they openly espoused violence, even if they mainly used it against each other.

Read Malcolm X's story alongside that of Martin Luther King and you will see that while King soared, moved mountains, changed lives, Malcolm X spent the best years of his life in fractious arguments with his own allies. As the Civil Rights Movement reached its peak in Selma and Birmingham and Jackson, Malcolm X was rowing with Elijah Muhammed about who should appear in The New York Times, or had fled abroad to avoid being gunned down by his political associates in a dispute over his mortgage.

[ King and Obama had a bit of help from Finkelstein's brethren, while black separatists recieved a lot of opposition from the same people. This was conveniently left out of Finkelstein's column. ]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article5133545.ece