Unlike the movement identified with Martin Luther King Jr., the League was secular and urban. Unlike the urban movement identified with Malcolm X, the League initiated direct action to achieve racial equality whenever it thought the conditions were favorable. Unlike the Black Panthers who based themselves on youth and spoke repeatedly of white guilt, the League focused on workers and spoke repeatedly of capitalist guilt. In Finally Got the News, a film produced by the League, John Watson, one of the League's founders stated a major organizational premise: workers, unlike students or street people, had the power to shut down society in a general strike. Students and street people were not to be ignored, but they were not structurally situated to be the engine of social change.