No one seemed to want the framed poster of the smiling and jovial Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The auctioneer’s voice lingered on the call-out for bids, but no hands with numbers shot up.
Not even mine. This was a poster by an artist I was unfamiliar with, and besides, I hardly ever buy posters or reprints. It was part of a lot that included a framed photo and postage stamp of Malcolm X. I had just bought a similar framed photo of King and his postage stamp.
The auctioneer looked my way, almost pleading or maybe hoping that I’d take this lot off her hands since I had bought the King photo. And so I did.
The poster was a good likeness of both these lions of the civil rights movement, who in the early years of the 1960s were far apart in their philosophy of how African Americans should repel a government that treated them as inferior. Looking at the poster, signed “Haiyan” and dated 1998, you’d think they were the best of friends.
When I got home, I put all of the items aside, but retrieved them recently when I was looking through a box of other photos I’d purchased at auction a few years ago. Inside, I found a photo on which the poster was based. In the poster, King and Malcolm were almost face to face, height to height. In the photo as in real life, King was shorter than the 6-feet-4 Malcolm, his head reaching to the former Nation of Islam leader’s shoulder.
The photo was taken during a brief encounter between the two men on March 26, 1964, when both were in Washington separately for the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act that first President Kennedy and then President Johnson had spearheaded. This face-to-face was apparently orchestrated by Malcolm X and his advisers following a press conference by King on the proceedings on the Senate floor. The bill had been passed by the House but was held up in the Senate by a filibuster driven by southern congressmen.
Malcolm X – who had called King himself all kinds of derogatory names and his 1963 March on Washington a “farce” – had slipped into the press conference to hear the reverend speak. Afterward, he accosted King in the hallway, holding out his hand. The man who helped orchestrate the meet, James 67X, said Malcolm X had expressed a desire to shake King’s hand.
What did the two men say to each other? Apparently not very much.
Here’s one account of what they said during the short encounter:
“Well, Malcolm, good to see you,” King said after taking Malcolm X’s hand. “Good to see you,” Malcolm X replied as both men broke into huge grins.
“I’m throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights struggle,” Malcolm X offered.
“Now you’re going to get investigated,” Malcolm X remarked.
King recalled later in an April 3, 1964, letter to Abram Eisenman: “At the end of the conference, he came and spoke to me, and I readily shook his hand,” adding that “my position is that of kindness and reconciliation.”
By the time he met up with King, Malcolm X had announced his break and disillusionment with the Nation of Islam. He wanted to organize a black nationalist movement, and had gotten started with the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, aimed at uniting blacks in America to determine their own destiny. He also advocated taking up arms in self-defense if necessary. That was a far cry from King’s nonviolence stand.
Despite their differences, the men are said to have come to respect the other’s philosophy and sincerity. Malcolm X met with Coretta Scott King in Selma in 1965 while King was in jail. He came, he told her, not to make King’s job any more difficult but to make white people realize that he was the alternative to King’s teachings.
Four months after that impromptu encounter, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, on July 2, 1964 – 50 years ago today. Malcolm X was killed in 1965 and King three years later.
The King-Malcolm poster resembles the style of artist Haiyan Wang (as well as the signature ), who has also painted portraits of the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Jimmy Hendrix, along with a portfolio of paintings of the Twin Towers in New York. She was born in China, and at age 16 entered one of the most prestigious fine art schools in the country, graduating in 1984, according to a biography. She was praised for her exhibition of portraits at the Fourth World Conference on Women held by the United Nations in Beijing in 1995.
That same year, she came to the United States, where she produced her “Portraits of the Legendary,” paintings of the stars of pop culture and others who have excelled.
