<P> On March 26, 1964, as the Civil Rights Act was facing stiff opposition in Congress, Malcolm had a public meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Capitol building . Malcolm had attempted to begin a dialog with Dr. King as early as 1957, but King had rebuffed him . Malcolm had responded by calling King an "Uncle Tom" who turned his back on black militancy in order to appease the white power structure . However, the two men were on good terms at their face - to - face meeting . There is evidence that King was preparing to support Malcolm's plan to formally bring the U.S. government before the United Nations on charges of human rights violations against African Americans . Malcolm now encouraged Black nationalists to get involved in voter registration drives and other forms of community organizing to redefine and expand the movement . </P> <P> Civil rights activists became increasingly combative in the 1963 to 1964 period, owing to events such as the thwarting of the Albany campaign, police repression and Ku Klux Klan terrorism in Birmingham, and the assassination of Medgar Evers . Mississippi NAACP Field Director Charles Evers--Medgar Evers' brother--told a public NAACP conference on February 15, 1964, that "non-violence won't work in Mississippi...we made up our minds...that if a white man shoots at a Negro in Mississippi, we will shoot back ." The repression of sit - ins in Jacksonville, Florida, provoked a riot that saw black youth throwing Molotov cocktails at police on March 24, 1964 . Malcolm X gave extensive speeches in this period warning that such militant activity would escalate further if African Americans' rights were not fully recognized . In his landmark April 1964 speech "The Ballot or the Bullet", Malcolm presented an ultimatum to white America: "There's new strategy coming in . It'll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, and something else next month . It'll be ballots, or it'll be bullets ." </P> <P> As noted in Eyes on the Prize, "Malcolm X had a far reaching effect on the civil rights movement . In the South, there had been a long tradition of self reliance . Malcolm X's ideas now touched that tradition". Self - reliance was becoming paramount in light of the 1964 Democratic National Convention's decision to refuse seating to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and to seat the state delegation elected in violation of the party's rules through Jim Crow law instead . SNCC moved in an increasingly militant direction and worked with Malcolm X on two Harlem MFDP fundraisers in December 1964 . When Fannie Lou Hamer spoke to Harlemites about the Jim Crow violence that she'd suffered in Mississippi, she linked it directly to the Northern police brutality against blacks that Malcolm protested against; When Malcolm asserted that African Americans should emulate the Mau Mau army of Kenya in efforts to gain their independence, many in SNCC applauded . During the Selma campaign for voting rights in 1965, Malcolm made it known that he'd heard reports of increased threats of lynching around Selma, and responded in late January with an open telegram to George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, stating: "if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans...you and your KKK friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not handcuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence ." The following month, the Selma chapter of SNCC invited Malcolm to speak to a mass meeting there . On the day of Malcolm's appearance, President Johnson made his first public statement in support of the Selma campaign . Paul Ryan Haygood, a co-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, credits Malcolm with a role in stimulating the responsiveness of the federal government . Haygood noted that "shortly after Malcolm's visit to Selma, a federal judge, responding to a suit brought by the Department of Justice, required Dallas County, Alabama, registrars to process at least 100 Black applications each day their offices were open ." </P> <P> St. Augustine was famous as the "Nation's Oldest City", founded by the Spanish in 1565 . It became the stage for a great drama leading up to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 . A local movement, led by Dr. Robert B. Hayling, a black dentist and Air Force veteran, and affiliated with the NAACP, had been picketing segregated local institutions since 1963, as a result of which Dr. Hayling and three companions were brutally beaten at a Ku Klux Klan rally in the fall of that year . </P>

Who led the civil rights movement in usa