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autobiography

Mark Twain Refuses To Succumb to the Silken Dainties of Isabel Lyon

Mark Twain made a painful confession that didn’t come to light until 100 years after his death, in 2010. He’d been flattered, manipulated and fleeced by a seductress: his personal secretary, Isabel Lyon.

Twain included the confession as part of his 5,000-page autobiography and ordered that it not be published for a century after he was “dead, and unaware, and indifferent.” He wanted to speak his “whole frank mind.”

Mark Twain

He wrote a scalding, often funny, 429-page attack on Isabel Lyon, who had been in cahoots with Twain’s self-appointed business manager, Ralph Ashcroft.

Scholars disagree about Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft. Was she Twain’s best friend, a devoted employee who relieved him of every care only to be attacked by a jealous daughter? Or were they really, as Twain called them, “a pair of degraded & sufficiently clumsy sharpers?”

Whatever the case, the 429-page screed, written as a letter to his friend William Dean Howells, had a specific purpose. A few months after Twain died in 1910, the letter accomplished its purpose.

Mark Twain Meets Isabel Lyon

Mark Twain met Lyon at a party in 1892, when she was 29 and working as a governess for a Hartford family. Paired with her at cards, he found her charming. At the end of the evening he was invited to return. “I’ll come only if I can play with the little governess,” he said.

She was the daughter of a Columbia University classics professor who died when she was 19. His death forced her to support herself and her mother.

Ten years after that card game, Twain’s wife Olivia hired Isabel Lyon to handle his correspondence, as she was too frail to do it herself anymore. Twain described her as “slender, petite, comely, 38 years old by the almanac, and 17 in ways and carriage and dress.” At first, she rarely saw the great man.

In 1903, Isabel Lyon and her mother traveled with Twain’s family to Italy and stayed in a cottage on the grounds of their villa outside Florence. Olivia then died in Italy in 1904.

Grieving, Mark Twain returned to the United States. Isabel moved in with the family in New York City, summering with them in Dublin, N.H., at the house of artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Twain had sold the house in Hartford because the family found it too painful to live where his daughter Susy had died in 1896.

The Main Chance

Isabel Lyon in a 1904 newspaper photo

Isabel Lyon realized the opportunity presented by her closeness to Twain as his secretary. She revered him, calling him the ‘King’ in her diary. She grew closer to him and gained more authority over his affairs.

Eventually, Lyon ran the household, handled his finances, edited his writing and acted as his social secretary. She also chaperoned his two surviving daughters, Clara, rebellious and difficult, and Jean, seriously ill with epilepsy.

Everyone, Twain later wrote, knew Isabel Lyon wanted to marry him. He knew it too. He described how she tried to seduce him in her silken dainties:

She would get herself up in sensuous oriental silken flimseys of dainty dyes, & stretch herself out on her bepillowed lounge in her bedroom, in studied enticing attitudes, with an arm under her head & a cigarette between her lips, & imagine herself the Star of the Harem waiting for the eunuchs to fetch the Sultan.

Touchy-Feely Isabel Lyon

She was always touching him, he complained to Howells:

…Miss Lyon is good company, agreeable company, delightful company … but there is nothing about her that invites to intimate personal contact; her caressing touch –& she was always finding excuses to apply it–arch girly-girly pats on the back of my hand & playful little spats on my cheek with her fan — & these affectionate attentions always made me shrivel uncomfortably–much as happens when a frog jumps down my bosom. Howells, I could not go to bed with Miss Lyon, I would rather have a waxwork.

“In all my (nearly) seventy-four years I have seen only the one person whom I would marry, & I have lost her,” he wrote. “Miss Lyon compares with her as a buzzard compares with a dove. (I say this with apologies to the buzzard.)”

Twain, calling himself “a born ass,” blamed himself for liking the attention.

Stormfield

Stormfield

By 1907, Mark Twain wanted to move out of New York. His biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, lived in Redding, Conn., and persuaded Twain to buy land, sight unseen, in the town. The property included a two-story saltbox house called the Lobster Pot. Twain gave it to Lyon in gratitude for her service.

Twain was touring, and left it to Lyon and an architect to build and furnish an 18-room Italianate mansion called Stormfield. (See a video of Mark Twain with Clara and Jean taken by Thomas Edison at Stormfield here.)

It was at Stormfield that Isabel Lyon met her Waterloo. She grew increasingly high-handed, spent Twain’s money lavishly and grew intimate with Ralph Ashcroft. Ashcroft had insinuated himself into Twain’s life as his business manager. But Lyon managed to alienate Clara and the servants.

Biographer Laura Skandera-Trombly, who is sympathetic to Lyon, writes:

… the most likely explanation for Clara’s ending Clemens and Lyon’s relationship was that it was beginning to resemble, much too closely for her comfort, a type of permanent union.

Putrescent Pair

Karen Lystra, though, writes that an audit showed Lyon had used Twain’s money to renovate the Lobster Pot without his permission. Lystra also had evidence that she and Ashcroft duped him into granting her power of attorney in November 1908.

Matters came to a head in 1909 when the family doctor told Twain to ask Lyon and Ashcroft to account for their stewardship. Twain was indignant. Ashcroft was indignant. Clara persisted in the accusations. Finally Twain grew suspicious when he broached the subject of an audit and Ashcroft and Lyon resisted.

Twain had an audit done.

Isabel Lyon then married Ralph Ashcroft in March 1909. The next month, Twain fired her and evicted her from the Lobster Pot.

She fought back in the press and in the courts. They battled until Twain settled out of court in 1909. Ashcroft got some money and Twain got the Lobster Pot. Just before he died, Twain sent a letter to John Hays Hammond:

First & last, in one way & another, that putrescent pair cost me $50,000 — & yet I have come out ahead. For they are tied together for life, & I was the unwitting reason of it.

And he denounced Isabel Lyon bitterly. Twain called her “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction.”

Father’s Weapon

Twain penned his 429-page attack on Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft between May and October 1909. The Ashcrofts moved to Chicago. Twain died on April 21, 1910.

Clara Clemens

Three months later, Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft tried to sell a manuscript they had taken from him. They wrote a letter to Clara threatening to blackmail her if she stopped the sale. Lyon knew about Clara’s affair with her married accompanist. Clara wrote to a friend:

But Father left me one weapon to use in case they troubled me any more & I used it. –He wrote out a full description of their entire story of dishonesty which I was to publish if there was no other way to keep them quiet.

Clara sent an attorney to Chicago, who retrieved the other manuscripts they’d stolen.

The Ashcrofts moved to Montreal in 1913 and separated in the 1920s. They divorced in 1927. Isabel Lyon died December 4, 1958 in New York City.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image: Portrait of Mark Twain ca. 1905 owned by the Mark Twain Library in Redding, Conn. From Terry Ballard via Flickr. CC By 2.0.

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Marian Anderson Sings at the Lincoln Memorial

It was one of the most extraordinary concerts in history. Marian Anderson sang before 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939. She did it because the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn’t let her sing before an integrated audience at their Constitution Hall.

Marian Anderson’s rich contralto voice, said conductor Arturo Toscanini, was heard “once in a hundred years.” Her dignified stage manner “melted the hearts of music lovers around the world,” wrote the New York Times. “Her determination helped shatter racial barriers in the arts.”

The Lincoln Memorial concert became a touchstone for the civil rights movement, a poignant symbol of African Americans’ struggle for equality.

Marian Anderson

Born Feb. 27, 1897, she rose from a poor childhood in South Philadelphia to acquire international fame and the warmth of a community in Danbury, Conn.

Until the mid 1930s, she performed mostly in Europe. There, she encountered less racial prejudice than in the United States. She sang everything from classical music to traditional American songs and spirituals.

In the late 1930s, Marian Anderson began to tour the United States, giving about 70 recitals a year. Despite her growing celebrity, she was denied admission to some hotels and restaurants. Albert Einstein helped her out. She first stayed at his house in 1937 when denied a hotel room before she performed at Princeton University.

Marian Anderson, 1940, by Carl Van Vechten. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The DAR’s refusal to let her perform thrust her into the international spotlight as a champion of racial equality. It sparked a furor in Washington, D.C., and a mass protest was planned. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR. She wrote about it in her weekly column. “They have taken an action which has been widely criticized in the press,” she wrote. “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.”

Then Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange the Lincoln Memorial concert.

The Concert

Anderson later admitted the prospect of that concert terrified her. But, she later wrote,” I could not run away from this situation. If I had anything to offer, I would have to do so now.”

Marian Anderson performed on Easter Sunday, not just to the 75,000 people standing before her, but to millions listening on the radio. Six microphones carried her voice for blocks.

Marian Anderson in front of the Lincoln Memorial..

The concert began at dusk. Ickes accompanied her to the stage under the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

“In this great auditorium under the sky all of us are free,” he said. “When God gave us this wonderful outdoors, He made no distinction of race or creed or color.”

She began with an emotional rendition of My Country ‘Tis of Thee. Then she sang she sang an aria from La favorite by Gaetano Donizetti. She followed that with Ave Maria by Franz Schubert and ended with the spirituals, Gospel Train, Trampin’ and My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord. At the end, the enthusiastic crowd insisted on an encore. She sang, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

Mitchell Jameson mural, “An Incident in Contemporary American Life,” 1943, inside the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Reaction

The concert lasted only a half hour, but it created a sensation. (Watch newsreel footage of it here.) The crowd rushed the stage, and police had to hold it back.

“I am so overwhelmed, I just can’t talk,” said Anderson when it was over. Then she thanked the crowd “from the bottom of my heart.”

Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, had joined Marian Anderson on stage. As the crowd surged forward, a single figure caught his eye.

It was a slender black girl dressed in somewhat too garishly hued Easter finery. Hers was not the face of one who had been the beneficiary of much education or opportunity. Her hands were particularly noticeable as she thrust them forward and upward, trying desperately, though she was some distance away from Miss Anderson, to touch the singer. They were hands that despite their youth had known only the dreary work of manual labor. Tears streamed down the girl’s dark face. Her hat was askew, but in her eyes flamed hope bordering on ecstasy. Life which had been none too easy for her held out greater hope because one who was also colored and who, like herself, had known poverty, privation, and prejudice, had, by her genius, gone a long way toward conquering bigotry. If Marian Anderson could do it, the girl’s eyes seemed to say, then I can, too.

Danbury

The year after the historic concert, Marian Anderson and her husband, architect Orpheus Fisher, bought a 100-acre farm on Joe’s Hill Road in Danbury. She lived there for 50 years.

The couple built a music studio on the property, now preserved and open to the public in downtown Danbury. They involved themselves in Danbury’s civic life. She joined the Danbury Music Centre board of directors. She also supported the Charles Ives Center for the Arts and the Danbury Chapter of the NAACP. He designed Danbury’s New Hope Baptist Church.

Marian Anderson insisted on being treated like an ordinary person. She would wait in line like everyone else at shops and restaurants. She visited the Danbury State Fair, gave a concert at Danbury High School, and at Christmas she sang at Danbury City Hall for the lighting of the Christmas tree.

Anderson died on April 8, 1993, one day shy of the 54th anniversary of her historic performance at the Lincoln Memorial.

The DAR

The Daughters of the American Revolution have since come full circle. Four years after refusing to let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall, they invited her to perform at a benefit for the American Red Cross. She said she felt no sense of triumph.

When I finally walked onto the stage of Constitution Hall, I felt no different than I had in other halls… I felt that it was a beautiful concert hall and I was very happy to sing there.

The DAR’s Constitution Hall.

Seventy-five years after Marian Anderson’s historic performance, the DAR scheduled a concert to honor her. Then in 2014, the DAR issued a press release.

The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is truly honored to celebrate the life, the talent and the legacy of world-renowned opera singer Marian Anderson on the upcoming 75th anniversary of her historic concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

With thanks to Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey by Alan Keiler. This story has been updated in 2022. Image: Constitution Hall By AgnosticPreachersKid at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17979389.

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Lucy Larcom Goes From Old New England to the New Lowell Mills

Lucy Larcom went to work as a Lowell mill girl at 11 years old to help support her family. The job was one of the best things that happened to her.

Lucy Larcom

That launched her as a published poet who wrote during the intersection of old New England with the new.

Lucy Larcom

Lucy Larcom was born in 1824 in Beverly Farms, Mass., the ninth of 10 children. Some of her ancestors came from England in the Great Migration of Puritans.

Her grandfather had fought in the Revolution and served as sexton of Old South church. Her father was a retired sea captain who ran a store that sold goods from the West Indies.

Lucy described Beverly as an old town that kept up primitive ways in her childhood. They used tallow candles and oil lamps, and cooked on the open hearth. After supper they sat by the dying fire and listened to sailor yarns and ghost and witch legends.

Cabot Street in Beverly, Mass., 1906

Like good New England Puritans, the Larcoms cooked beans on Saturday so they didn’t have to work on the Sabbath. They didn’t celebrate Christmas, but did enjoy Training Day, when the militia marched to the Common. Election Day in late May also came with election cake. The only other holidays were the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Fast Day.

The farmers up and down the shore were as much fishermen as farmers, she wrote, as familiar with the Grand Banks as with their own potato fields.

Her father died when Lucy was e ight. To survive, Lucy’s mother sold her house in Beverly Farms and moved inland, to the new manufacturing city of Lowell.

Lowell

Lucy Larcom was eight years old when her father died, leaving his widow with 10 children, eight of them girls, and little to live on.

Poverty crept in on the family, and her mother decided to open a boardinghouse in the new city of Lowell.

Lowell, wrote Lucy, ‘had a high reputation for good order, morality, piety, and all that was dear to the old-fashioned New Englander’s heart.’ Because young women worked in the factories, people considered Lowell an experiment.

In the early days of the textile factories, mill girls were carefully supervised, their morals closely guarded. They could take advantage of Lowell’s many cultural offerings: lending libraries, self-improvement societies, concerts and lectures by philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“We learned no theories about ‘the dignity of labor,’ but we were taught to work almost as if it were a religion,” Lucy wrote in her book, A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory. It is now used as a reference for historians on early American childhood.

Mill Girl

Lucy first worked as a doffer, a job for the youngest girls. Doffers took full bobbins from the spinning frames and replaced them with empty ones. They worked from 5 in the morning to 7 in the evening with a half hour for breakfast and for dinner.

“It has taken nearly a lifetime for me to make up the sleep lost at that early age,” wrote Harriet H. Robinson, Lucy Larcom’s good friend in the mills.

It was a pity, wrote Lucy, a “that we were set to hard work while so young.”

Addie Card, a 10-year-old spinner in the North Pownal [Vt.] Cotton Mill, 1910. Hine described her as ‘Anaemic little spinner.’ Her image appeared on a postage stamp and in a Reebok ad, and she inspired the novel ‘Counting on Grace.’

The Lowell Offering

In the few hours the mill girls had to themselves in the evenings, they avidly pursued their education and self-improvement. In 1840, the pastor of the First Universalist Church started the Lowell Offering, a magazine of fiction and poetry written by the Lowell mill girls. Eventually its scope broadened, and it published one of the first criticisms of the U.S. government’s treatment of Indians.

Lucy Larcom and Harriet Robinson contributed their poems and stories describing life in the mill. Wrote Lucy:

I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.

Lucy’s poems caught the attention of poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and her story about life in the mills was published by The Atlantic Monthly.

Both girls would publish poems and books. Harriet would become a leader in the suffragist movement. Lucy would teach school in Illinois, then return to Boston to edit a children’s magazine that became St. Nicholas Magazine. A local literary magazine in Beverly is named for her, as is a mountain in New Hampshire, a dormitory at Wheaton College and a park in Lowell, Mass. She died in 1893.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Clam Chowder the Jacques Pepin (and HoJo’s) Way

In his delightful autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, Jacques Pepin describes his years working at Howard Johnson’s. He deeply admired Howard Johnson, who he called “charismatic, powerful and soft-spoken,” a straightforward businessman open to new ideas.

Pepin and his wife had dinner with him on his yacht one summer evening They were embarrassed that the chairman of the board served them himself.

Jacques Pepin

“Fried clams and New England clam chowder were popular menu items at Howard Johnson’s, and I soon learned to love them,” wrote Pepin, who now lives in Madison, Conn.

He then made the chowder was in 3,000-gallon amounts, but he reproduced the taste with this recipe – “when a bit of Howard Johnson’s nostalgia creeps in.”

Clam Chowder the Jacques Pepin Way

5 quahog clams or 10 to 12 large cherrystone clams
4 cups water
4 ounces pancetta or lean, cured pork, cut into 1-inch pieces (about ¾ cup)
1 tablespoon good olive oil
1 large onion (about 8 ounces), peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces (1-1/2 cups)
2 teaspoons chopped garlic
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2-1/4 cups Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into ½-inch dice (one pound)
1 cup light cream
1 cup milk
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Directions

Wash the clams well under cold water, and put them in a saucepan with 2 cups of the water. Bring to a boil (this will take about 5 minutes), and boil gently for 10 minutes. Then drain off and reserve the cooking liquid, remove the clams from their shells, and cut the clams into 1/2 –inch pieces (1-1/2 cups). Put the clam pieces in a bowl, then carefully pour the cooking liquid into another bowl, leaving behind any sediment or dirt. (You should have about 2-1/2 cups of stock.) Set aside the stock and the clams.

Put the pancetta or pork pieces in a large saucepan, and cover with the remaining 2 cups water. Bring to a boil, and boild for 30 seconds. Drain the pancetta, and wash it in a sieve under cold water. Rinse the saucepan, and return the pancetta to the pan with the oil. Place over medium heat, and cook gently, stirring occasionally, for 7 to 8 minutes. Add the onion and garlic, and continue cooking, stirring, for 1 minute. Then add the flour, mix it in well, and cook for 10 seconds. Add the reserved stock and the thyme, and bring to a boil. Then add the potatoes and clams, bring to a boil, cover, reduce the heat to very low, and cook gently for 2 hours.

At serving time, add the cream, milk, and pepper, bring to a boil, and serve. (Note: No salt should be needed because of the clam juice and pancetta, but taste and season to your liking.)

Read more about Howard Johnson’s in our story, Howard Johnson’s: From 2 Restaurants to 1000 and Back. This story was updated in 2021.

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Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Take a Freedom Trail Out of Boston

In 1951, Boston Evening Traveler columnist Walter Schofield began campaigning for the city to create a path taking pedestrians past milestones of the American Revolution. By May, Mayor John Hynes bowed to the pressure and agreed to establish the Freedom Trail. Two young men — Malcolm X and Martin Luther King — took note.

Malcolm X in 1964

Malcolm Little was incarcerated in the Norfolk Prison Colony that year. Martin Luther King was just settling in to his St. Botolph Street apartment as he began doctoral studies at Boston University.

The history of Boston’s fight for freedom cannot have been lost on them. Their rhetoric centered on freedom. “I believe in a religion that believes in freedom,” said Malcolm X. “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” wrote Martin from Birmingham Jail.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

But religion, not revolution, marked the path of liberation for these two deeply spiritual men. Boston turned Malcolm Little into Malcolm X when he left in the summer of 1952. Boston turned Martin Luther King into Dr. King when he left for Montgomery, Ala., in 1954. There he had a job as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Within 18 months, Martin would rocket to the center of the international stage as a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. For Malcolm, fame would take longer. He would attract a large following to the Nation of Islam. But not until 1959 did he attract much attention beyond the black community.

Mrtin Luther King delivering his “I Have a dream” speech.

White people found Martin’s pacifist, integrationist religion far more palatable than Malcolm’s muscular Islam. By 1957, Time put Martin Luther King on the cover of Time and Meet the Press. interviewed him on television. Prime time wasn’t ready for Malcolm’s message of black independence, pride and entrepreneurialism within the African-American community.

Together they would play good cop, bad cop in the struggle to lift up American blacks. They learned how to do it in Boston.

The Cradle of Freedom

Both men immersed themselves in the city’s culture of scholarship and debate, even if for Malcolm that meant the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library and debating society. Martin was cocooned in a white, liberal school of theology that welcomed black scholars. Malcolm studied the literature of slavery in an extraordinary prison library.

Both men acknowledge the influence Boston had on them. Malcolm wrote in his autobiography, “No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.” Martin often referred to Boston as his second home.

Martin at BU

Boston must have been exciting for a young doctoral student from the Deep South. He had never lived in a multicultural, mixed neighborhood like Boston’s South End. That’s what Martin found at 170 St. Botolph St. for his first few months in Boston, and then at 397 Massachusetts Ave., in the middle of this first year at BU. It must have also been a heady experience to debate with world-famous religious philosophers like Edgar Brightman.

In the ‘40s and ‘50s, Boston University was a center of liberal theological thought. It welcomed African-American graduate students. Brightman led the school of theology known as Boston Personalism. From Boston Personalism, Martin derived two tenets of his thought: belief in a personal God and belief in the dignity of all mankind.

Marsh Chapel.

In his final year at Boston University, King family friend Howard Thurman became dean of BU’s Marsh Chapel, the first African-American dean of a predominately white university. An internationally known theologian, he knew Gandhi. He became Martin’s spiritual advisor. Martin was said to have carried until his death Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited. The book shows how to use the Gospel as a guide to resistance for the poor and disenfranchised.

The Parkhurst Collection

A very different institution had a profound influence on Malcolm: The Parkhurst collection at the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library. In 1946, Lewis Parkhurst, a successful Unitarian lawmaker and publisher, had bequeathed his books to the prison. The collection had so many books that some were still in crates when Malcolm was transferred to Norfolk in 1948.

The Parkhurst collection included anti-slavery pamphlets and books, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It also had the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted — probably The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. And it included Frances “Fanny” Kemble’s Journal of A Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839.

The cruelty of chattel slavery described in Parkhurst’s books horrified Malcolm X. Writes Louis DeCaro in John Brown the Abolitionist – A Biographer’s Blog: “Malcolm went so far as to say that “Not even Elijah Muhammad could have been more eloquent than those books were in providing indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world’s collective non-white man”.”

Malcolm X Rise to Fame

Upon his release from prison, Malcolm moved to Detroit, where he worked for his brother in a furniture store and in an auto plant. Then he moved to Chicago to live with Elijah Muhammed, the leader of the Nation of Islam. He returned to Boston in 1953 to start Temple Number 11 at 35 Intervale St. in Dorchester. By the next year Elijah Muhammed appointed him minister for Temple Number Seven in New York, but he returned to Boston to build the membership of the Boston temple.

35 Intervale St. today. Photo courtesy of @ 2021 Google.

The Nation of Islam grew rapidly, in part because of Malcolm’s charisma, his tireless speaking and his message. He had little use for Martin’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance – he called it the “philosophy of the fool.” And he saw no good coming from political involvement with white people. He preached that black people must separate from the race he called “white devils,” and he defended African-Americans’ right to fight violence with violence. That resonated with black people who faced vicious white resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. They concluded whites would never grant blacks equality. It made sense to them to build all-black social and economic institutions.

Hate that Hate Produced

In 1955, Malcolm served as minister of Temple Number 12 in Philadelphia. He also founded three successful Nation of Islam temples in Hartford, Atlanta and Springfield, Mass. By 1959, a documentary about the Nation of Islam called, The Hate That Hate Produced made him a national figure.

Malcolm helped elevate Martin’s image with white people. Martin wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He refused to meet with Malcolm or respond personally to his overtures. “Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief,” he said.

Malcolm X guards his family home in an Ebony magazine photo.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

When Martin and Coretta Scott King permanently moved to Montgomery in the summer of 1955, a campaign had already begun to end segregation on city buses. In March, before Martin obtained his doctorate, police arrested a 15-year-old black girl. She had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. Black activists had started to build around that case to challenge Alabama’s bus segregation laws.

Martin Luther King (left) and Rosa Parks in 1955.

Then they decided to stop riding the buses after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on Dec. 1, 1955. Martin, not yet 30, found himself in the middle of the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott. It ended on Dec. 20, 1956, when a court ruled the state’s segregation laws violated the Constitution.

The bus boycott rocketed him to fame. In 1957 he met with President Eisenhower and formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Within the next 10 years he would be arrested in Selma and Birmingham and deliver his “I Have a Dream” Speech before 250,000 people. He would also win the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 35 – the youngest ever to do so.

King would also lead marches in the North for better housing, better schools and better jobs. He led one such march in Boston on April 23, 1964, during one of his frequent visits to the city. The march followed a speech to the Massachusetts Legislature the day before. The audience included young lawmakers Michael Dukakis and William Bulger, reported WBUR.

March on Washington

By 1963, two events just a few months apart would indelibly stamp onto history the good-cop, bad-cop images of Martin and Malcolm. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech, one of the most famous in history. Malcolm called it the “Farce on Washington.” Three months later, Malcolm would shock the world. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he commented the “chickens [were] coming home to roost.”

But both men were changing. Martin got more aggressive, demanding more than just integration and acceptance. More and more he aligned himself with the militant American labor movement. He once said that when he listened to Malcolm speak, even he got angry.

The March on Washington itself was organized by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The demands of the march went beyond desegregation. They included a $2 minimum wage, a federal jobs program and the expansion of federal labor regulations to more classes of workers such as farmworkers and domestics. Many forget that Martin was assassinated in Memphis while he supported the sanitation workers’ strike.

Malcolm, too, was changing. He would soon renounce the Nation of Islam and embrace traditional Sunni Islam. In February 1965 he said, “I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then … pointed in a certain direction and told to march.”

He also recognized that the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a stunning success. He realized he had to present a strategy to improve the lives of African-Americans. In doing so, he harkened back to work he’d done with Randolph in 1961 to fight the deterioration of York City’s black communities. Their strategy: raise workers’ wages.

MLK Meets Malcolm X

And once Malcolm left the Nation of Islam in 1964, he began to pay attention to civil rights issues and to reach out to civil rights leaders – including Martin.

Their only meeting.

On March 26, 1964, they met for the only time. The meeting lasted for about one minute, long enough to shake hands and have their picture taken. They had both come to Washington, D.C., to watch the Senate filibuster the Civil Rights Act. Eight days later Malcolm X made a speech titled “The Ballot or the Bullet.” In it, he advised African-Americans to exercise their right to vote wisely. He also announced he would form a political organization.

By then, both men correctly expected to die soon. Gunshots killed each at the age of 39. Malcolm died on Feb. 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Martin was then murdered on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

Malcolm X Meets With Coretta Scott King

Just a few weeks before he died, Malcolm X met with Coretta Scott King in Selma, Ala., while her husband served time in the Birmingham Jail. Malcolm told her he came to make Martin’s job easier. “If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King,” he said.

To read the first part of this story, click here. We are indebted to several books for this article: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Also, Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable. Finally, Parting the Waters: America in The King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

Images: Marsh Chapel By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17310479. Malcolm X with gun By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3898865. This story was updated in 2022.

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