Kohlberg, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr, Are some

societies better than others

A half-century after their deaths, Martin Luther King Jr, Kohlberg and
Malcolm X was the world’s most revered political activists.

They were respected leaders of the American Civil Rights movement,

struggling for racial equality and freedom. But at the start of the 1960s, the
media were constructing a conflict that stirred the civil rights debate:
Malcolm X versus Reverend Martin Luther King.

While King advocated non-violent direct action and passive resistance to

achieve equal civil rights, Malcolm X was the spokesman for the Nation of
Islam (NOI), the black Muslim movement which violently rejected white
America and its Christian values, and preached the supremacy of blacks
over whites.

He promoted a segregationist approach that sought to instil in blacks a

pride in their African heritage, whereas Martin Luther King believed that
self-respect would come through integration.

“King was working to take down signs that prevented black people from
riding buses where they wanted to, and to ride in trains, public
transportation, preventing them from voting, and all of those things that
black people were prevented from doing in the south. In the north, blacks
always could vote, but as Malcolm said ‘You may have the vote but you ain’t
no voting for nothing because they’ve already decided that you are not
going to have any power’,” explains historian James H. Cone.

King once told the press that “the method of non-violent resistance is one of
the most potent, if not the most potent weapons available to oppressed
people and their struggle for freedom.”

However, for Malcolm, turning the other cheek was a weak strategy that
was unacceptable.

“Malcolm comes from a black nationalist tradition that does not believe
that you can get your freedom, your self-respect, your dignity by simply
letting somebody beat up on you, and you do not try to defend yourself.
That’s why Malcolm emphasised self-defence. But King emphasised non-
violence because if blacks had responded, tried to defend themselves, that
would have brought the police department down on those demonstrators
and whites would have loved to have the chance to kill black people
indiscriminately. So King and Malcolm had that tension,” says Cone.
The theory holds that moral reasoning, the basis for ethical behavior, has
six identifiable developmental stages, each more adequate at responding to
moral dilemmas than its predecessor. Kohlberg followed the development
of moral judgment far beyond the ages studied earlier by Piaget, who also
claimed that logic and morality develop through constructive stages.
Expanding on Piaget’s work, Kohlberg determined that the process of moral
development was principally concerned with justice, and that it continued
throughout the individual’s lifetime, a notion that spawned dialogue on the
philosophical implications of such research.