Civil rights icons crossed paths once

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met only once. On March 26, 1964, the two black leaders were on Capitol Hill, attending a Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

King was stepping out of a news conference when Malcolm X, dressed in an elegant black overcoat and wearing his signature horn-rimmed glasses, greeted him.

“Well, Malcolm, good to see you,” King said.

“Good to see you,” Malcolm X replied.

Cameras clicked as the two men walked down the Senate hall together.

“I’m throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights struggle,” Malcolm X told King.

King would say later: “He is very articulate, but I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views — at least insofar as I understand where he now stands.”

The exchange would last only a minute, but the photo remains a haunting reminder of what was lost. They would never meet again before each was assassinated, first Malcolm X and then King.

That moment on Capitol Hill would continue to be analyzed by scholars for its import and its potential. Every word would be scrutinized. Some would call it the moment the two leaders reconciled. Others would say they were never that far apart. They both had the same goal: equal rights and justice for black people in America.

King and Malcolm X were often seen as adversaries in the black freedom struggle. Malcolm X, who advocated a nationalist approach to equal rights for black people, often taunted King, criticizing him for subjugating blacks to their white oppressors and teaching them to be “defenseless in the face of one of the most cruel beast that has ever taken a people into captivity.”

King ignored the criticism. “We still advocate non-violence, passive resistance, and are still determined to use the weapon of love,” King said during a March 22, 1956, news conference in Montgomery, Ala. “We are still insisting emphatically that violence is self-defeating, that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

Although the two men held what appeared to be diametrically opposing views on the struggle for equal rights, scholars say by the end of their lives their ideologies were evolving. King was becoming more militant in his views of economic justice for black people and more vocal in his criticism of the Vietnam War. Malcolm X, who had broken with the Nation of Islam, had dramatically changed his views on race during his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca.