Malcolm X as a person is an interesting character. He has a very loyal base of supporters that wanted to see him succeed in his fight for racial equality throughout the 1950s and 60s but sadly his life was cut short by one of his very own followers that started not to agree with the methods that he wanted to go about to gain this racial equality.

We see that Martin Luther King Jr. had more of a civil approach to fighting for racial equality, such as peaceful protest and marching, but Malcolm X had more of an eye-for-an-eye type of approach, he urged fellow black Americans to protect themselves against white aggression by any means necessary, which ended up becoming the slogan of his campaign for racial equality. He got this quote from a satirical play, “Dirty Hands”, and to the distress of American intelligence agencies the French were captivated by Malcolm X as well.

But in this man’s methods, there was a silver lining to what he was standing for, in order to understand how he felt you have to see about the adversity blacks had faced, even after being freed from the shackles of slavery, he felt like even being oppressed after all of that, that we deserve the right to fight back, but only if we were forced into the position of having to fight back. The reason why I give this confusion and analogy is that he has an interesting character that’s hard to dissect and digest. You have to look into his quotes of what he stated to people such as, “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone, but if someone puts his hand on you, send them to the cemetery.” Quotes like this, give us the violent side Malcolm X had, but it doesn’t show us the full story of his personality because it’s needed to be understood that he doesn’t do this for just being oppressed because he’s black, he does this for the people that are minorities in America. He quotes that, “…human rights are something you’re born with, human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are rights recognized by all nations of the world and anyone that violates those human rights, you can take them to the world court.” He says this in reference to the United States in their injustice, that they gave colored people in America at the time, so we could see that he had a reason to his violence and his way. 

This ties back to who Malcolm X is as a person. He is someone that has the right idea, but the wrong intentions. We could see as they are before Martin Luther King had the right idea and the right intentions to achieve his idea, but we could see that the downfall of Malcolm X was due to his violent nature of trying to fight for the same justice that Martin Luther King was fighting for and that he deserves just as much respect in the right that he was a big name in a big part of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 60s.