Double Biography of Martin & Malcolm Rings Superlative

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X in Washington DC during the 1964 efforts for a Civil Rights Bill. The Two Civil icons met only once in life for 64 seconds.

By Kevin C. Peterson

THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD

The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.By Peniel E. Joseph, A Review

By Kevin C. Peterson

In 1963, Eric Dolphy, an outwardly serene and taciturn avant garde jazz reedman, was on fire.

He had just released his latest album called Iron Man, a mostly cacophonous offering full of sound and frenetic musical fluctuation which would augur that year in the United States an advancing social tumult relating to the impending hyperbolic condition of race relations.

Over the nation there seemed as if the Erinyes of vengeance and retribution hovered and tossed violently within a whirlwind of agitation — alighted especially by the nation’s blacks, whose century long endurance since their emancipation, had yielded only continued hatred from the whites: the outright denial of their citizenship and arched animus toward their dignity in a country that had pledged neither friendship nor fealty.

Professor Peniel Joseph, in his superlative new book, The Sword and the Shield, The Revolutionary Lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, captures the frantic tenor of the Civil Rights Movement with astounding verve: the remonstrance and the reckoning…