Faced with the choice of embracing blackness or Christian faith, a few preachers chose blackness, left the church, and joined the Nation of Islam or some other non-Christian black religion. Blackness spoke to the soul of black being-in-the-world, and no one had articulated blackness better than Malcolm. “We are black first and everything else second,” he had declared. Martin King, meanwhile, was uncomfortable with talk of blackness; he remained a Negro all his life and only reluctantly used the word “black” when pressured by black militants. He would not talk publicly or even privately with
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