MLK and Malcolm X only met once. Here’s the story behind an iconic image.

On March 26, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X met for the first and only time.

The men were two of the most influential Black activists of the 20th century—and had long been pitted against each other in the media. They had both come to the U.S. Senate for the outcome of the vote on the Civil Rights Act.

For King, this was a big moment. In January, he’d been named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” In October, he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population.” But, most importantly, he’d played a major role in getting the Civil Rights Act on the table.

Malcolm, meanwhile, was at a crossroads. Earlier that month, he’d been forced out of the Nation of Islam, a Black nationalist organization whose membership he’d drastically increased. Free from its restrictions, Malcolm had recently formed Muslim Mosque, Inc. He was at the U.S. Senate to decide his next move.

At King’s press conference, Malcolm sat in the back, listening. When it ended, they exited—and met.

Flashbulbs popped. Film whirred.

After they exchanged greetings, Malcolm told King, “I’m throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights cause.”

Within four years, both men would be assassinated. This iconic photograph captured a moment a long time in the making. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Two rising leaders—and two missed connections

On May 17, 1957, King led a demonstration in Washington, D.C. to demand voting rights for Black Americans in his first national speech, “Give Us the Ballot.” This, coupled with King’s involvement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, launched him as the leader of the civil rights movement.

(This is the history of Martin Luther King Day.)

Malcolm saw an opportunity.

Weeks earlier, Malcolm had led thousands of New Yorkers to the police station to demand that NOI member Johnson X Hinton be released from jail and returned to the hospital. Hinton had been brutally beaten by police after he’d tried to stop them from beating another Black man. He was imprisoned with a cracked skull, deep cuts in his head, and blood clots in his brain.

The police agreed to Malcolm’s demand. According to the scholar Peniel E. Joseph in his book The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., after Malcolm saw Hinton, he dispersed the protesters with the flick of his hand. A deputy police inspector turned to a reporter and said, “That’s too much power for one man to have.”

In contrast to King’s belief in nonviolent resistance, Malcolm believed in meeting violence with violence. He believed in voluntary separation, not integration. He believed in Black nationalism, which meant Black people controlling their politics and economy, and rooting out vices such as drug addiction and alcoholism in the Black community. It also meant Black pride and Black history and self-determination—and ultimately establishing a Black Nationalist party.

Malcolm saw King’s rising star—and their potential together—and wanted King to see firsthand what the NOI was all about. Over the course of the next few months, Malcolm twice invited King to join him at rallies.

But King was a no-show both times; his secretary replied they’d received the second invitation too late.

A plea for unity during a time of crisis

It would be another few years before Malcolm tried again.

In April 1963, the world watched as civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, were beaten and attacked by dogs, while firemen pummeled kneeling children with hoses filled with high-pressured water. King had been arrested in the melee and his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” appeared in papers nationally.

(These are the streets that have MLK's name.)

Malcolm, meanwhile, was successfully drawing attention to the Black nationalist movement. While King was still in jail, Playboy magazine’s candid interview with Malcolm “pushed Malcolm further into the national spotlight,” wrote Joseph.

At the end of July 1963, Malcolm sent a letter inviting King and other Black leaders to a unity rally in Harlem to deal with the “present racial crisis”—likely referring to the 750-plus civil rights demonstrations that took place in nearly 200 cities with nearly 15,000 arrested.

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Malcolm pointed to a recent meeting between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, arguing that if they “could form a united front, despite their tremendous ideological differences, it is a disgrace for Negro leaders not to be able to submerge our ‘minor’ differences.”

Martin didn’t reply or send a delegate.

Instead, eighteen days after the rally, King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” in front of more than 250,000 demonstrators at the March on Washington.

Coming closer together

The success of the march and public horror over the brutality in Birmingham aided the passage of the Civil Rights Act—and the iconic meeting between the two leaders. But it didn’t bring them closer together, not at first.

When Malcolm told King he was joining the civil rights cause, he meant his version. Malcolm believed the current civil rights struggle needed a “new interpretation.”

“Civil rights means you’re asking Uncle Sam to treat you right,” Malcolm said during his April 3, 1964 “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech. “Human rights are something you were born with ... Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations.”

Malcolm still didn’t believe in nonviolence, but he was changing. He was willing to consider nonviolence unless violence was used against him. He was willing to let white people “help us but not join.” Most importantly, he wanted Black civil rights leaders to forget their differences.

In June 1964, he formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity and sent a telegram to King, who was working to bring attention to the Ku Klux Klan’s violence in St. Augustine, Florida. In his telegram, Malcolm offered protection—yet still King didn’t reply.

By February 1965, however, it looked like the men would finally sit down together. According to author Anna Malaika Tubbs in The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, both were scheduled to meet with Black psychology professor, Kenneth Clark—although the proposed agenda is unknown.

But Malcolm was assassinated on February 21, 1965, two days before the meeting.

After Malcolm’s assassination, King’s approach began to shift closer to Malcolm’s as he led protests against the Vietnam War and forged relations with Black Power activists. 

(Martin Luther King, Jr.’s multifaceted view on human rights still inspires today.)

Yet on April 4, 1968, he was shot dead on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. Like Malcolm, King was only 39 years old.

What if they had worked together?

Malcolm was known to be a skilled debater—and frequently criticized King publicly. King’s secretary is thought to have once said that King wouldn’t debate him because King “has always considered his work in a positive action framework rather than engaging in consistent negative debate."

James H. Cone, founder of Black liberation theology and author of Martin & Malcolm & America, had another theory. “King always refused largely because he knew that if he met with Malcolm, support from the white community would be almost eliminated.”

But we do have an idea of how the two might have worked together thanks to Coretta Scott King. In 1965, she and Malcolm both spoke at a church meeting in Selma, Alabama. As Coretta later recalled in a 1988 interview, Malcolm asked her to tell her husband that he “didn't come to Selma to make [King’s] job more difficult. But I thought that if the White people understood what the alternative was, that they would be more inclined to listen to your husband.”

The words, along with his kind manner and sincerity, surprised Coretta.

“After hearing reports of Malcolm’s exemplary behavior in Selma,” wrote Joseph, “King made quiet plans to reach out to him after the conclusion of the voting-rights efforts in Alabama.”

Malcolm was murdered weeks later.

“Martin had the greatest respect for Malcolm,” Coretta said in the same interview, “and he agreed with him in terms of the feeling of racial pride and the fact that Black people should believe in themselves and see themselves as lovable and beautiful.”

“I think if he had lived, and if the two had lived, I am sure that at some point they would have come closer together and would have been a very strong force in the total struggle for liberation and self-determination of Black people in our society.”