Peniel E. Joseph: the Sword and the Shield: the Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

  • PDF / 163,042 Bytes
  • 4 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
  • 73 Downloads / 174 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT


Open Access

Peniel E. Joseph: the Sword and the Shield: the Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Basic Books, 2020. x + 373 pp. ISBN 978-1-5416-5 Hardback Floyd W. Hayes III 1 Published online: 7 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Honorable El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (aka Malcolm X) and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. strode across the landscape of this place called America, leading their Black followers in the monumental struggle for freedom, justice, equality, citizenship, and democracy. From America’s founding as a colonial and slave society, Black people were excluded from participation in virtually every aspect of the social order. Indeed, the US Constitution defined the great multitude of Africandescended Americans as a class of sub-humanity. Therefore, the main objective of white Americans has been to stifle Black development—identity, social, economic, cultural, and political—at all costs. Of course, White people historically have denied this reality, producing this nation’s culture of pretense. America lies to itself. This nation may have been theoretically conceived in liberty, but slavery and racism damned it as a democracy. No matter what theoretical approach to the study of democracy—normative, realist, empirical, behavioral, representative, deliberative, power, etc.—America is not, and never has been, a democracy. Hence, it could be argued that Malcolm X and King led struggles that were in vain. How could that be possible? What is necessary is a critical reevaluation of democratic politics, which this essay will undertake briefly near its end. Now comes The Sword and The Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. by historian Peniel E. Joseph, 29 years after Black liberation theology founder James H. Cone published Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Cone 1991), when Cone’s book was published, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements had been crushed by the power of the brutal American political state. Cone sought to resurrect the memories, ideas, and activities of the two major leaders of the struggle for Black freedom during the mid-twentieth century. Cone informs that he gained his perspectives on Christian religion from liberal moralist King and his Black consciousness from Malcolm X’s radical realism. While King embraced hope, the American dream, and

* Floyd W. Hayes, III [email protected]

1

Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

510

Journal of African American Studies (2020) 24:509–512

belief in the goodness of white people and America, Malcolm X believed that the struggle for Black liberation entailed a struggle against America’s white power structure. He distrusted White people and rejected the concept of the American dream. Cone argued, however, that as their lives came to an end, Malcolm’s and Martin’s ideas and activities tended to converge. Significantly, Peniel Joseph puts forward a similar thesis. Joseph follows the lives of M