It’s difficult to grasp the route black America took to its present understanding of itself and its complex relationship to this country. If those years can be understood as a sort of test, black America looked at the multiple-choice question of identity and answered yes. It’s partly a reflection of the fact that black aspirations for equality were far more complicated than the simple Martin versus Malcolm formulation, just as each man was far more complicated than his public depiction. This circumstance is not entirely indicative of a failure of will. A black president coexists with residential and educational patterns that are in some instances more racially separated than they were on the morning of the 1963 March on Washington. The America we inhabit now is both more socially integrated and segregated than it was in the tumultuous days in which the two men lived. have long been understood as dueling poles of identity, one an apostle of contempt, urging a downtrodden race to renounce a nation that had rejected it, the other an exemplar of Christian idealism, committed to the redemptive power of forgiveness and common humanity. In the iconography of black American history, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
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