King conflated antiracists and Black separatists, and later distanced himself from both

Evidence

No one knows whether the sickly W. E. B. Du Bois read King’s jailhouse letter. But just as Du Bois had done in 1903, and later regretted, in his letter King erroneously conflated two opposing groups: the antiracists who hated racial discrimination, and the Black separatists who hated White people (in groups like the Nation of Islam). King later distanced himself from both, speaking to a growing split within the civil rights movement. More and more battle-worn young activists had grown critical of King’s nonviolence and disliked the pains he took to persuade away the racist ideas of Whites. More and more, they were listening to Malcolm X’s sermons about self-defense, about persuading away the assimilationist ideas of Blacks, about mobilizing antiracists to force change. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 954

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the reader’s exact analytical task: distinguishing the antiracist who hates discrimination from the separatist who hates Whites. Kendi shows even King momentarily blurring these categories, so the definitional boundary is load-bearing.
• XREF: Directly useful for the reader’s testing goal — segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist against real historical actors. Malcolm X’s position (persuading away the assimilationist ideas of Blacks) maps onto Kendi’s scheme.