Also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm X (1925–1965) was a prominent member of the Nation of Islam, a Black religious and political organization devoted to improving the lives of African Americans. In contrast to Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam was, you guessed it, Muslim. West Africa is also largely Muslim, but when African slaves arrived in the U.S., many ended up converted to Christianity. So the Nation of Islam was trying to restore some of African Americans' pre-slavery heritage.

Slavery also took away slaves' names, because owners renamed slaves however they wanted. Slave owners also attached their own last names to slaves to indicate ownership. So Ousseynou Traoré might become Harold Washington.

What's in a name? Oh, you know—just culture, history, identity. That sort of thing. Unlike religion, names are basically impossible to recover. Without records, they're just gone. Hence the X in Malcolm X, which stands for "a guy who was born Malcolm Little but has gotten rid of the name 'Little' because that was the name of his ancestors' owner." Lots of Nation of Islam members used the X.

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Now, as you might guess, an organization that emphasizes everything the U.S. took away from Black people might be a little…upset about it. And Malcolm X definitely cut a different figure from MLK. He wasn't against Dr. King: he knew they were working for basically the same goals. He just saw his own way of thinking as a credible threat backing up King's peaceful demands. If Dr. King couldn't secure African Americans' rights using peace, Malcolm X was willing to secure them using violence—or, as he famously put it, "by any means necessary."

To borrow an expression from Theodore Roosevelt, Dr. King spoke softly, while Malcolm carried the big stick.

Even though MLK didn't endorse Malcolm X's ideas, he accepted the truth of them. As King said once, "Those who will make this peaceful revolution impossible will make a violent revolution inevitable" (source). At some point, people get sick of waiting.

By the time King said these words, though, Malcolm X was dead. He had become disillusioned with the Nation of Islam and had struck out on his own. He said some things the Nation didn't like, so, like mature, rational human beings (/s), they shot him. He was 39—the same age MLK would be when he was killed three years later. Can we just skip from 38 to 40?