It was Sunday, February 21, 1965, and the black activist Malcolm X had just emerged on stage for another of his rallies at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. No sooner had he done so than a commotion began. “Get your hands out of my pocket,” someone shouted, as if accosting a thief. Heads turned at the diversion. And at this moment three gunmen stood up and sprayed Malcolm X with bullets. Hit 16 times, he died shortly after arriving at hospital.

I wish I could tell you that he had been killed in the service of civil rights, gunned down by white supremacists to silence him. At least then his death would have made some sort of sense, advanced a cause, changed some minds. But racial politics wasn't why Malcolm died.

Malcolm X was killed by other members of his own Nation of Islam movement, as part of a sordid squabble about women and money. He had said he would reveal that Elijah Muhammed, the head of the movement, was not the holy man and spiritual leader he claimed to be.

Instead, Malcolm believed he could show that the man was a fraudster and a philanderer. He had evidence, he said. Elijah's two secretaries had turned up on the lawn outside the leader's home a couple of years before, carrying their children and shouting that they wouldn't go away until Elijah comforted his babies. The women had been frightened off, but Malcolm, being himself familiar with violence, was not so easily frightened. Not when Nation members chased him in his car and tried to drive him off the road, not when they burnt down his house. He went on threatening exposure, so, in the end, he had to die.

Malcolm X shot dead at Harlem rally

Malcolm X, who was leader of the Black Muslim movement until last year, was killed this afternoon while addressing a rally in a ballroom

BACKGROUND

• Voters honour Martin Luther King's dream

• The Rev James Edward Orange

• Following Jesus in love and anarchy

• America pays its respects to the mother of civil rights movement

I start with Malcolm X's miserable death, because I want it to be remembered in the week that an African-American went to the White House, preparing to move in. Barack Obama's victory has been widely reported as a victory for Martin Luther King. And so it is. But it is not just a victory for King over the White supremacists, and Democrats of the Jim Crow Deep South. It is also a victory for King over Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.

Reading now of King's campaign for civil rights, the only reaction is to be stunned by its courage, awed by its restraint. It is not just the little children who marched to jail, or the beating of marchers who got right up and kept marching that impresses. It is the discipline and the humanity.

Beaten bloody, even shot, and needing medical attention, civil rights activists would find the entrance to the hospital blocked by jeering, violent white thugs. Marching, they would be knocked to the ground. Eating in a restaurant they would be punched and kicked. Yet through it all, they would not raise their arms in violence. They had been trained not to, they taught themselves not to, they resisted that human impulse because they thought that it was morally wrong and would damage their cause. How much greater can courage get?

But to many African Americans, King's non-violent campaign didn't seem courageous at all. The students were frustrated at their elders in the movement, chafing at their compromises, yawning or even laughing at speeches from leaders - even those of King - that they sometimes thought pompous and beside the point. When Martin Luther King marched in Harlem in early 1960s, eggs were thrown at him.

So the courage King needed was not just to withstand the beatings and jailings, it was also to withstand the taunts and the accusations of people like Malcolm X.

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam argued that non-violence would never work, that it was cowardly. Blacks and whites could never live together, they said, and there would never be anything approaching equality. So they eschewed the Civil Rights Movement, banning members from political action and holding the jail marches in open contempt. They wanted segregation of their own, based on black pride. And they openly espoused violence, even if they mainly used it against each other.

After his death, Malcolm X became a cult hero, largely as a result of his autobiography, a book that was mostly written for him by Alex Haley, the man who later wrote Roots. Malcolm X is considered a hero of the black struggle. There are schools named afer him, and a boulevard in New York. There has been a film. There has been an opera.

The reality was rather different. The black pride of Malcolm X was understandable. The rejection of non-violence was understandable too. It required saintly forbearance not to take up arms against the oppression that black people were suffering and not everyone is capable of such saintly forbearance. What is striking about Malcolm X then is not his exotic doctrine, but that he was extraordinarily ineffectual.

Read Malcolm X's story alongside that of Martin Luther King and you will see that while King soared, moved mountains, changed lives, Malcolm X spent the best years of his life in fractious arguments with his own allies. As the Civil Rights Movement reached its peak in Selma and Birmingham and Jackson, Malcolm X was rowing with Elijah Muhammed about who should appear in The New York Times, or had fled abroad to avoid being gunned down by his political associates in a dispute over his mortgage.

A new film about the boxer Muhammed Ali - a devotee of the Nation of Islam, Cassius Clay was given his new name by Elijah Muhammed - attests that he addressed a Ku Klux Klan rally. And the Nation also palled about with the American Nazi party. They all wanted the same end, you see - racial segregation.

The irrelevance and the internal rows and the pacts with the Devil are all part and parcel of embracing cultist violence and rejecting mainstream compromise. And the election of Mr Obama is a rebuke to people like Malcolm X, a symbol that Martin Luther King was right with his patience, and his give and take and his belief in democracy. For, in the end, democracy triumphed. In the end, non-violence worked. In the end, moderation and self-discipline and restraint worked.

The election of Mr Obama is a rebuke too, to the Eta Basque separatists who put bombs in shopping centres, to the IRA with their pub bombs, to the Baader-Meinhof gang with their abductions and killings. It is a rebuke to the Irgun terrorists whose terrible crime was to blow up the King David Hotel and to the murders and missiles of Hamas and Fatah. It is a rebuke to all those who abandon law and peace in favour of the gun.

And it is an affirmation that sometimes it is the moderates who are the boldest, the slow route that is the quickest, and the man who refuses to raise up his arms who is the most courageous.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden