I stumbled across the X-Men on Wikipedia and it says that Proffessor X could have been based on MLK and Magneto could have been based on Malcolm X. 
 

Racism: Although this was not initially the case, Professor X has come to be compared to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and Magneto to the more militant Malcolm X. The X-Men’s purpose is sometimes referred to as achieving "Xavier’s dream," perhaps a reference to King’s historic "I Have a Dream" speech. Magneto, in the first film, quotes Malcolm X with the line "By any means necessary." X-Men comic books have often portrayed mutants as victims of mob violence, evoking images of the lynching of African Americans in the age before the American civil rights movement. Sentinels and anti-mutant hate groups such as Friends of Humanity, Humanity's Last Stand, the Church of Humanity and Stryker'sPurifiers are thought to often represent oppressive forces like the Ku Klux Klan giving a form to denial of civil rights and amendments. In the 1980s, the comic featured a plot involving the fictional island nation of Genosha, where mutants were segregated and enslaved by an apartheid state. This is widely interpreted as having been a reference to the situation in South Africa at the time 
 

I've heard it a dozen times. It pretty much makes perfect sense.

Stan Lee stated years ago that one of his inspirations for the X-Men was the Civil Rights Movement. This was his way of addressing the situation of the time, with Xavier being King and Magneto being X respectively, and mutants as the stand in for African-Americans. On a side note: if you look at the names Xavier starts with X, like Malcolm X, and Magneto begins with M, like Martin. The names have been fixed to correspond to opposites.

Yes agreed.

I thought that was Stan Lee's intention.

Yup

Another thing is, Proff. X was created in 1963, same year of MLK's dream speech.

"Sigh"

This is....

FACT!!!!!

@biggkeem89 said:

Stan Lee stated years ago that one of his inspirations for the X-Men was the Civil Rights Movement. This was his way of addressing the situation of the time, with Xavier being King and Magneto being X respectively, and mutants as the stand in for African-Americans. On a side note: if you look at the names Xavier starts with X, like Malcolm X, and Magneto begins with M, like Martin. The names have been fixed to correspond to opposites.

@comicdude23 said:

Another thing is, Proff. X was created in 1963, same year of MLK's dream speech.

Bingo.

This has been brought up dozens of time before in several threads. It's pretty much been accepted as fact at this point.

@comicdude23: I could have sworn I had come across at least one thread here whose OP was about this very topic but my search is acting funny. I think I'm grouping together instances where the topic was brought up in threads discussing the movie in general with threads that actually make the Civil Rights Movement/ Mutants the focus of discussion. On other sites it's been brought up as well. It's still been discussed at length before, all I'm saying.