The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Revisited in ‘The Sword and The Shield’

Dr. Peniel E. Joseph’s The Sword and The Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. could not have been published at a more apropos time.

As the nation witness around-the-clock protests following the horrific deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and countless other unarmed Black men and women killed at the hands of police officers and White vigilantes, Joseph provides readers with a historical blueprint on how two of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders of the 1960s — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — navigated the political and social terrain of their era.  

While the two men who rose to international fame in their twenties are often juxtaposed against each other in America’s historical narrative — with King often portrayed as the timid and meek leader and Malcolm as the more radical militant — Joseph provides us with a deeply nuanced and complicated picture of the two religious figures. He argues that both were indeed revolutionaries who dramatically transformed the nation and indeed the world by testing a variety of ideologies designed to improve conditions for Black Americans. 

Despite the tendency to pit the two men against one another — similar to how historians tend to compare Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois to Booker T. Washington — Joseph informs the readers that Martin and Malcolm were deeply aligned on many goals and opinions, albeit their tactics and public personas may have been different. 

Their young widows — Dr. Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King — even developed an abiding friendship and sisterhood that continued decades after their martyred husbands were killed by assassins’ bullets before either one of them turned 40.  

It is no coincidence then that Joseph begins The Sword and The Shield with the widely circulated black and white photo of Martin and Malcolm on Capitol Hill smiling and shaking hands on the national stage. On that day — Thursday, March 26, 1964 — U.S. senators were debating the pending civil rights bill that had faced serious opposition.

“What I wanted to do was get behind the photo and talk about these men converging at different crossroads in their lives,” says Joseph in an interview.