Sword and the Shield by null

Sword and the Shield Reviews

• 
  T J Ganski

  This book juxtaposes MLK with Malcolm X and in doing so brings clarity to the effectiveness of both by virtue of their almost symbiotic existence.
  
  I am one who has grown to admire how MLK maintained his commitment to peaceful direct action protests throughout his all too short life.
  
  I have also been curious about Malcolm X who made several serious transformations through his all too short life. As a white person, I have always been leery of Malcolm X as he is too often presented as an advocate of violence among races as a way to make progress.
  
  This book helped clarify for me that all is not as it seems. The implication is that MLK would not have been as effective with non violence had there not been Malcolm X articulately legitimizing the likelihood that violence would be the only way to break the yoke of racism in our country.
  
  On the other side of the coin, it is unlikely Malcolm X would have made his final transformation without the example of MLK.
  
  The impact of both men is best exemplified in their attendance at the Senate hearings and brief encounter for the Civil Rights Act. Just having them both there likely kept the Senators focused. MLK's presence helped focus them that they either pass the bill and hope to avoid violence. Meanwhile, Malcolm X' presence helped them keep it real in the case that no bill passed.
  
  Reading this book during the tensions brought about by the police murder of George Floyd makes this book even interesting. While MLK arguably got done in his life with his approach, Malcolm X was the prophetic as to whether or not passing civil rights legislation would mean the end of racism and related discontent.
• 
  Eddie Hutchinson

  As I was reading about the relationship between Martin almost identical. Even though they were in the same space, history has them meeting only once, but destiny has them linked together forever. Hopefully, The Sword and the Shield will have you in deep reflection as well. This is my third Peniel Joseph book on the shelf. I was waiting for the release of this book and it was worth the wait.
• 
  Chezare Warren

  This book is an outstanding contribution to African American history. Joseph brilliantly and deftly narrates the lives of two of the most important figures in the fight for global human rights. His work demonstrates that Malcolm and Martin were indeed alike than dissimilar, and that their contributions have radically transformed our understandings of Black dignity and Black citizenship locally and abroad. Bravo Dr. Joseph!
• 
  Wally Wood

  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 revolutionary and Malcolm pragmatic than the general view of the two leaders. Given the current state of race relations in America, the book could not be 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 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.
• 
  Thuraya Zeidan

  Dr. Peniel Joseph is an amazing writer and researcher. I love that he offers a lens on Malcolm X and MLK that we normally aren’t taught or shown. I learned so much from this book and plan to implement parts of it in my high school classroom.
• 
  Readerly

  Smart, insightful, concise. If you think you know MLK and MX, think again. This book will challenge your understanding.