Malcolm and Martin: Martyrs for the Revolution

The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

By Peniel E. Joseph

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were the two most influential African-American figures of the 1950s and 1960s whose legacies continue to have an impact on the 21st century. They met only once, leaving the visitor’s gallery of the U.S. Senate in March 1964. The accepted view holds that King was a moderate, conciliatory, integrationist while Malcolm was a militant, inflammatory, black-firster. 

Peniel Joseph, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and engaging biographer, has crafted this dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to demonstrate that the two leaders’ worldview was not all that far apart and that each influenced the other. Both led revolutionary lives.

A dual biography technique works when two portraits can be played off against each other to demonstrate both commonality and contrast. This book does that well. 

Malcolm was born in 1925, King, in 1929. Malcolm was assassinated in 1965, reportedly at the behest of the Nation of Islam from whose leader Elijah Muhammad he had broken. White racist James Earl Ray was convicted for King’s 1968 murder.

King grew up as a member of Atlanta’s black elite reared with middle-class values. His strong-willed father was a respected Baptist pastor. His mother, Alberta trained as a teacher. (She was tragically murdered by a follower of a Black Hebrew Israelite cult six years after Martin’s assassination.)

Martin studied divinity at Morehouse College (not that he necessarily wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps). From there, it was on to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and for a doctorate at Boston College.

Along the way, he became enamored with the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska. His father Earl was also a large personality, also a Baptist minister but more itinerant and less successful partly because he was an argumentative fearless follower of the black separatist Marcus Garvey. A white racist gang probably murdered him.

Malcolm’s light-skinned Caribbean-born mother Louise suffered a nervous breakdown, and the family of eight children disintegrated. Placed in foster care, Malcolm wound up a street hustler, then graduated as “Detroit Red” to prison after a burglary conviction. There Malcolm read voraciously on black issues. His brother Reginald introduced him to the Nation of Islam, and soon he was corresponding with the Hon. Elijah Muhammad. The sect’s leader recognized his talents and, upon his release, Malcolm quickly became Muhammad’s protégé and spokesman.

Neither King nor Malcolm served in WWII. King was a divinity student and Malcolm primarily because he didn’t see why he should.

The book explores the personal lives of the two men, their intellectual and political development, how they competed, what they had in common, and how they influenced each other. Neither man was without fear, but both persevered notwithstanding violence and intimidation. 

Sword and the Shield also provides context for Black America’s human rights struggle focusing on the 60s’ and 70s’ when the civil rights and black power movements competed for paramountcy.

The persistent, intractable viciousness of Jim Crow – violent and institutional racism that kept blacks from enjoying their rights as U.S. citizens – comes through clear.

Politics is not just about principles; it’s also about rivalries and personalities. Joseph sketches some of the big names who tangled or collaborated with his two central figures, among them Bayard Rustin, Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Abernathy, LeRoi Jones, Roy Wilkins, Elijah Muhammad, Adam Clayton Powell, and Ella Baker.

One of the book's messages is that by the end of his career, King had embraced a radical understanding of American politics and economics. His analysis of the root cause of the black predicament is not dissimilar to Malcolm’s. King’s civil disobedience was a middle course between Malcolm’s revolution and waiting for white America to come to its senses. It was by no means passive resistance.

Both men favored a radical restructuring of society. King tempered his message to white audiences. Malcolm played the racial arsonist even when I suspect he knew better.

King was close to black power SNCC militant and future Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael; Carmichael, for his part, came to see himself as an inheritor of Malcolm’s constituency.

Though the author is sympathetic to the two leaders and their cause, this is not iconography. He does not gloss over Malcolm’s criminal background or King foibles (adultery and plagiarism). As products of their time, both men tended to denigrate women especially those who demonstrated political acumen.

Malcolm was ultimately open to understated coalition-building even as he remained the foremost prosecuting attorney against white America. The more he traveled, the harder it was for him to stay loyal to the crackpot theology – my characterization, not Peniel Joseph’s – of the Nation of Islam. 

Both men wielded the sword alongside the shield even if King was associated more with the shield of non-violence and Malcolm the sword of “by any means necessary.” King's warnings about the likelihood of "counterproductive" violent summer rioting sounded to some like threats.

Both leaders sought to connect the struggle of African Americans to the global human rights and national liberation movements. Malcolm saw European colonialism in Africa and racism in the US as motivated by the same mindset and interests.

Malcolm identified with pan-African, pan-Islamic, and Third World leaders whom he wanted to coopt as supporters of his campaign in the US. He was the foreign minister of the black power movement. King understandably leveraged his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize so he could lobby for civil rights back home. 

Both worked to rebrand, refashion and reimagine blackness. "Black is beautiful" was a necessary campaign because white America had been inculcating across society the idea that it was anything but. 

The book is illuminating but leaves some gaps. I am not faulting Peniel Joseph for telling the story his way. My parochial concern is that Jewish readers will get no hint of the role anti-Semitism plays in the black power movement. For from Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan and from Leroi Jones to Stockley Carmichael – not to mention Malcolm X himself – the pernicious scapegoating of Jews is a ubiquitous feature of black chauvinism.


King-era establishment figures were friendly to Jews (as was King himself). 

But the persistence of disproportionate raw anti-Semitism in the African-American community (across its socio-economic divide) needs to be acknowledged. Indeed, not a few leaders who had been in King's orbit went on to dabble in Jew-baiting and anti-Israelism.

This history matters to me because, as a yarmulke-wearing yeshiva kid growing up in New York’s Alphabet City in the 60s and 70s, avoiding random black (and Puerto Rican) violence was a daily concern. 

Financially comfortable Jews had joined in white flight from the inner city. Left behind were thousands of “identifiable” poor Jews like me.

In those days I had not heard of Jim Crow. But I knew that blacks were once slaves. 

How did that history explain torching synagogues (many of whose congregants were Holocaust survivors), or hurling New York City telephone directories out of housing project windows down at elderly Jewish passersby?

Time and distance provide some perspective: to appreciate the enormity (and distinctiveness) of racial slavery and its attendant dehumanization. How bondage was followed not by rehabilitation and reconstruction but by extreme poverty. Education and enlightenment were mostly blocked. Jim Crow made the exercise of U.S. citizenship nearly impossible. Migration from the south to the north led to further dislocation. Too many black families were dysfunctional, illegitimacy was rampant, hopelessness prevailed, and catalyzed deviant behaviors among swaths of the African American population. 

We inner-city Jews felt the end results of these phenomena and had cause to feel helpless, prejudiced, and fearful. 

We thought that the Jews who disproportionately contributed, politically and financially, to the civil rights establishment (from the 1940s onward) were, certainly, by the late 1960s naive. All these years later their help proferred to black colleges, organizations, and causes seems to have bred more suspicion than appreciation. 

That said, our greatest animus was directed against “limousine liberals” like Leonard Bernstein, who in 1970 was stuping cash at the Black Panthers. 

I feel differently about the contributions made by the Marxist Stanley Levinson. Perhaps because he wasn't a “limousine" or "white flight" liberal but an enigmatic Red. 

Peniel Joseph raises Levinson's profile in Sword and the Shield and this reader is grateful.

Levinson was born in 1912 into a lower-middle-class Far Rockaway, NY, non-observant, Yiddish-reading, left-leaning family. He became a macher in the Communist Party but, disillusioned with Stalin, broke inalterably with the CPUSA in 1956. 

Besides being a highly educated, intellectual, and passionate Marxist, Levinson was also a successful businessman. Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin made the match between Levinson and Martin Luther King in 1956. The relationship between the reverend and the red evolved into an intellectual and strategic partnership.

Levinson was an administrative wiz and King’s collaborative editor. He was instrumental in helping to bankroll the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, and in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

King and Levinson also, apparently, became genuine friends.

Their relationship drew the attention of the FBI’s sinister J. Edgar Hoover, who informed President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that Levinson was manipulating King and the civil rights movement to destabilize America. FBI wiretaps ostensibly aimed at Levinson had uncovered King’s womanizing. The unscrupulous Hoover tried to blackmail King into abandoning the civil rights struggle and even to drive him to suicide.

The Kennedy’s insisted that King break his relationship with Levinson if he wanted administration support for civil rights legislation. With Hoover lurking, the White House did not want to be tainted by hints that it was on the same side as the communists.

King resisted their pressures. Nonetheless, Levinson and he began working more secretly to take the heat off. 

Levinson was not shilling for Moscow. He had channeled his progressive energies into civil rights. He even discouraged King from speaking out against the Viet-Nam War, fearing doing so would make it harder to fundraise for the movement.  

To his credit, King did no such thing even at the price of jeopardizing his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson.  

My narrow criticisms notwithstanding, I can think of no better place to begin exploring the legacies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X than with Peniel Joseph's The Sword and the Shield.

N.B., I listened to the audio version of this book adeptly read by Zeno Robinson.

FURTHER READING

Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers by Ben Kamin.

 

The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick

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New York Review of Books