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Social Justice and Civil Equality: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Essay Example

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Social Justice and Civil Equality: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Essay Example
Social Justice and Civil Equality

In the pursuit of social justice and civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, sought to amend a flawed system. To accomplish this task, these men entered the armory and chose to wield nonviolence as their weapon. Their goal: to combat violence with nonviolence, to fight hate with love, and to spread equality through peace. In the end they succeeded. Violence breeds violence, hate breeds hate, it is an ineffective approach and an archaic mean to resolving societies issues. Malcolm X and Carmichael were both extreme individuals but that does not make them violent. They attacked social justice and civil rights passionately and assertively, not violently. The methods used and arguments made by Martin Luther King Jr. in Letter from Birmingham Jail, Malcolm X in The Ballot or the Bullet, and Stokely Carmichael in Black Power, demonstrate the potency of nonviolence. These men address three separate issues in each of their works. King discusses social issues in regards to the nation as a whole in his letter. Malcolm X speaks to the political equality of black individuals in African American communities. Carmichael discusses white supremacy and its oppression of African American citizens in their own community. Fighting with peace, protesting with nonviolence, is the most effective measure when pursuing social justice and civil rights. I will show how Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael used passive methods and nonviolent means in conquering the issues they had at hand. Martin Luther King Jr. was an advocate of nonviolence, a proponent of peace, and pursued social justices in the civil rights era directly and nonviolently. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail and through his countless marches and speeches, he was able to show how nonviolence can be used to combat the social injustices taking place throughout the nation. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail on

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