Lest we forget, there were some who thought that Martin Luther King Jr. was too moderate. People such as Malcolm X disliked King's non-violent and integrationist approach.
Stokely Carmichael was one such man.
Carmichael was the chairman of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a younger and more militant group within the civil rights movement. As time progressed, he grew more radical, adopting black separatism as an ideology and agreeing to expel whites from SNCC. In his "Black Power" speech, he said:
Now we maintain that in the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a "thalidomide drug of integration," and that some Negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people; and that that does not begin to solve the problem....
A staunch opponent of racial integration, he left SNCC (or it broke with him) and he became part of the Black Panther Party, but left the latter organization, citing "its dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals." One could imagine Carmichael sarcastically criticizing the notion of a biracial coalition and singing "Kumbaya" in support of civil rights.
Carmichael eventually changed his name to Kwame Ture and moved to Africa, where he became an advocate of Pan-Africanism based in Guinea. He disliked the upward mobility of American blacks as more joined a middle class that the devoted Marxist deemed inherently racist and "anti-humanist."
Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, Jr. represent different ways to fight and I think that King's model is superior. It's not just about why we fight and what we fight for, but also how we fight. Dr. King, who was inspired by Gandhi and made a trip to India, provides for us a timeless example of how to struggle against oppression. I honor him not because of the cause he is most associated with or because of his martyrdom in the name of that cause, but because of the example he set which speaks to us now on a host of issues other than black civil rights.