Dr King Stated:
You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars…. [W]e are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism.
There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.
Malcolm X stated:
Well, any form of integration, forced integration, any effort to force integration upon whites is actually hypocritical. It is a form of hypocrisy involved.
If a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that’s brotherhood. But if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that’s not brotherhood, that’s hypocrisy.
And what America is trying to do is pass laws to force whites to pretend that they want Negroes into their schools or in their places of employment.
Well, this is hypocrisy, and this makes a worse relationship between black and white, rather than if this could be brought about on a voluntary basis.
He then expanded on the flaws of MLK’s forced integration strategy when the topic of the Montgomery Bus Boycott came up:
I don’t think having an opportunity to ride either at the front or the back or the middle of someone else’s bus does not dignify you.
When you have your own bus, then you have dignity. When you have your own school, you have dignity. When you have own your own country, you have dignity. When you have something of your own, you have dignity.
But whenever you are begging for a chance to participate in that which belongs to someone else, or use that which belongs to someone else, on an equal basis with the owner, that’s not dignity, that’s ignorance.
Malcolm X also critiqued the sit-in strategies civil rights activists employed and insisted that blacks build their own economic institutions instead:
Instead of the negro leaders having the black man begging for a chance to dine in white restaurants, the negro leaders should be showing the black man to do something to strengthen his own economy, to give himself an independent economy, or to provide job opportunities for himself. Not begging for a cup of coffee in a white man’s restaurant.
