Off-Campus Extended Studies Courses

This course explores the religious dimensions in the life, philosophy, and work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., two iconic figures whose complicated lives and articulate rhetoric were deeply shaped by religion, and their transformative role in the modern Civil Rights movement, the African American struggle for inclusion, law, and the construction of a democratic ethos in America and beyond. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, it emphasizes how the religious dynamic in Malcolm and Martin's heritage, personal development, consciousness, constructions of self, and society, impacted their significant and lasting contributions toward America's 'long civil rights movement,' and pursuit of its utopian promise. It also reflects on the ways in which their religious commitments and activism, framed between chaos and community, affected their environment, families, relations with other major figures in the global black struggle for emancipation--across the lines of gender, race, and sexuality. Ultimately, it reflects on their interrogations of contemporary society, the pathways of freedom they kept open, and the ways in which they are remembered.