Why Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are relevant today

The subtitle of Professor Joseph’s dual biography is “The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr,” and the book’s goal is to demonstrate that King was more revolutionary and Malcolm more pragmatic than the general view of the two leaders. Given the current state of race relations in America, the book could not be more timely.

Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. His five earlier books include The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era; Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America; and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama.

He acknowledges from the beginning that there were substantive differences between Malcolm and Kain, in the role of violence in organizing a political revolution and on the source of racial oppression. But a binary understanding of the men is incomplete.

“Two-dimensional characterization of their activism, relationship, and influence,” he writes, “obscure how the substantive differences between them were often complimentary. It underestimates the way they influenced each other. And it shortchanges the political radicalism always inherent in each, even when they seemed to be reformist or reactionary.”

After two short chapters sketching their backgrounds (“The Radical Dignity of Malcolm X” and “The Radical Citizenship of Martin Luther King”) Joseph spends the rest of the book on the ways in which the two reacted to, were affected by, and influenced the Civil Rights movement covering roughly the period 1954 (Brown vs. Board of Education) through February 1965 (Malcolm’s assassination) to April 1968 (King’s assassination).

The Sword and the Shield could be read as a primer on how to effect social change. King in Birmingham, AL, advocating nonviolent resistance with rallies, meetings, and boycotts of downtown stores. Malcolm arguing that it was necessary to fight against police brutality. “President Kennedy,” said Malcolm, “did not send troops to Alabama when dogs were biting black babies. He then sent troops after the Negroes demonstrated their ability to defend themselves.”

When an off-duty police lieutenant shot a 15-year-old black teenager in New York City in July 1964, protests erupted into a full-scale riot in Harlem. Martin went to the city in the temporary vacuum among black militants because Malcolm was in Africa. It was a fruitless. “Harlem exposed King to a deeper reality of institutional racism that made him better able to understand Malcolm X’s political rage, as well as the intractable forces that remained obstacles to the revolutionary changes that true justice required.”

Readers who want a more complete portrait of Malcolm X should read Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. For the life of King, there is the three-volume biography and history of the Civil Rights movement:  Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge.

I lived through the period The Sword and the Shield covers. I met King (my college newspaper held a fund-raiser for the SCLC) and lived in Harlem and I clearly recall the 1964 riot. Reading Joseph’s book, however, made me wonder if I were sleepwalking the entire time. So much I didn’t know. So much is new. So much is made clear.

In his Epilogue, Joseph writes there is no way “to understand the history, struggle, and debate over race and democracy in contemporary America without understanding Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.’s relationship to each other, to their own era, and, most crucially, to our time.”

While the Civil Rights movement outlawed the worst of Jim Crow, America has managed to innovate “new forms of racial oppression in criminal justice, public schools, residential segregation, and poverty that scar much of the black community.”

The Sword and the Shield puts an important period in American history and two key figures into context.