A number of leaders, intellectuals and writers influenced the outcome of the Civil Rights movement and the Afro-American struggle for emancipation in the 1950s and 60s. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Bayard Rustin were prominent among them-each having their own philosophy for attaining similar goals.

Martin Luther King Jr., the son of a Christian Baptist preacher and himself a Baptist Minister, was a "moderate" who struggled to remove desegregation from the American society. He became the leader, symbol and spokesman of the Civil Rights Movement, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He combined the Gandhian doctrine of non-violent struggle and the Christian philosophy of universal love and brotherhood into his political philosophy. In doing so, he gained the support and respect of the white liberals, many of whom joined in his 'direct action' movement for gaining civil rights for the black community and removing the barriers of segregation and racial injustice from the American life. King justified his civil disobedience, freedom marches, and the "sit-ins" by insisting that the "equality" and "freedom" guaranteed by the US Const

itution applied to all Americans irrespective of color, and that the defiance of unjust laws was morally correct. (King, 1963)

There were several other important black leaders in the US, besides the ones mentioned above, during the civil rights movement. Stokley Carmichael was the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who coined the slogan of "Black Power!" making it the rallying cry of the increasingly angry African-Americans in the inner cities of the US. A radicalized Stokley advocated a complete break of the blacks from the white society and called for black people in the country "to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community...to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations." (Kaufman 1998) He became critical of the black leadership that called for integration of blacks into the existing white middle class culture considering it an insult to the culture and identity of African Americans.

James Baldwin, the American writer/ activist's thoughts on the subject are understandably far more seminal and less one-dimensional. In his best-selling The Fire Next Time (1963) calls on the "relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks...who must, like lovers...create the consciousness of the others [... to] end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world." (Quoted by Zaborowska, 2002). He later expressed his growing doubts whether the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King, or the racial pride and physical force of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, was the right solution to the nation's problems. (Ibid.) Baldwin warned prophetically in The Fire that the increasing bitterness among blacks and the failure of the white

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