Civil Rights Movement Facts That Your History Books Got Wrong

Here’s a couple astounding stories from the civil rights movement that your history books and history teacher certainly forgot to mention.

“MLK and Malcolm X were philosophical immoderate opposites” It’s commonly presumed that Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were on contrary sides of the playing field as far as civil rights. Though, accordant to historian David Howard-Pitney, “in the last years of their lives, they were starting to move toward one another. … While Malcolm is moderating from his earlier position, King is becoming more militant.”

Paradoxically, Malcolm began actually confiding in Coretta Scott King, King’s wife. In 1965, the same year he was assassinated, X conversed “at length” with Coretta “about his personal upheavals and voiced an interest in working more closely with the nonviolent movement,” Dr. King said.

In a historically noteworthy telephone series, accordant to King, Malcolm stated “if the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”

“The LGBT movement and the civil rights movement were separate” It’s widely assumed that these two human rights movements were separate matters, however numerous leaders at the forefront of the civil rights movement were too homosexual. Bayard Rustin, the craftsman of the 1963 March on Washington, is the most prominent.

Rustin was a dear confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. and played a pivotal role in introducing him to the non-resistance passive methods of Gandhi. Rustin remained ‘in the closet’ throughout the ’60s, but at length came out and lived proud. In 1987 he spoke “Twenty-five, 30 years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.”

Other essential LGBT leaders of the civil rights movement include Marsha P. Johnson, Pauli Murray, Barbara Jordan, and James Baldwin, among others.