Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

Thirty-two years after Martin Luther King Jr. was felled by an assassin's bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, he has become an idol, not only to America's black community for whose freedom he gave his life, but to all those who work for racial equality and justice all over the world. On January 15, the world commemorates the birthday of the slain civil rights leader, which President Ronald Reagan made an American public holiday in 1986.

As President of the Montgomery Improvement Association and later, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Martin Luther King fought for racial equality. His struggle formally began on 1st December 1955 - when Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. This sparked off the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. He was abruptly cut off by an assassin's bullet on April 4 1968 in Memphis while supporting striking sanitation workers.

Throughout his short but eventful life, King strongly believed in and passionately advocated a dream of racial equality which was rooted in the American dream of according all the citizens the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. His famous "I Have a Dream" speech, which he delivered during the 1963 March on Washington, accurately sums up his creed. In that speech, King said in part:

"This [the dream] is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day."

To achieve this dream, King employed non-violent resistance in order to disturb the conscience of the white majority and force them to grant the black minority their humanity, on the same terms as all other American citizens. His commitment to non-violence, even in the face of great provocation by the racist authorities in the South made him win the coveted Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, becoming the youngest person to do so.

But King was not alone in contributing to the success of the civil rights movement. Others, both within the SCLC and elsewhere, gallantly played their part.

Malcolm X was another eloquent black leader in the '60s who also met his death at the hands of an assassin. The violent end to their eventful lives is one of the few similarities between King and Malcolm. Although they both worked for the emancipation of black people, their methods and messages were seemingly complete opposites.

King was born to a middle class family and grew up in a posh sub-urban home; Malcolm was raised in a lowly family, his family was on welfare and he spent many of his early years in jail. King was an urbane intellectual with a PhD in Theology from the prestigious Boston University; Malcolm had little formal education and was self-taught in prison and on the streets. King was a charismatic Christian Minister; Malcolm was a fiery Muslim preacher. King was philosophical, suave and sophisticated in his analysis and articulation of America's troubled race relations; Malcolm tended to be viciously demagogic and racist in his early viewpoint of what ailed America.

But if their approaches to the crucial issues were different, the two men's prescribed cures were even more starkly so. King saw America on the whole as a great nation to live in, but which urgently needed to put its house in order by giving its black citizens a place at the table; he strove for the "beloved community" where all races would live together in harmony as God's children. He wanted all Americans to live in a society where they 'would not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character'. He strongly believed in the racial integration of all of America's citizens and he challenged the white establishment to live by the creed it proudly professed in the Declaration of Independence: All men are born equal.

Malcolm, on the other hand, began his civil rights crusade as an avowed segregationist - He once joked that the only thing he liked integrated was his coffee. He believed that black and white people could not live in harmony together in the same country. His was a remnant of Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa Movement. But Malcolm would have been content if some of the States in the US were set apart for black people only and that they were granted autonomy to govern themselves as they deemed fit.

But were the two leaders as far apart as they are perceived to have been, or is their apparent polarisation