Professor James Cone's book Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or A Nightmare? provides insights for "racial reconciliation" activists about why Minister Malcolm X/El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz may be such a popular image for African-American youth and young adults. He also creates constructs that offer reflections on why Rev. Dr. M.L. King Jr. similarly is a popular image among African Americans and white Americans alike. In essence, the author graphically leads the reader to a level of consciousness that allows him or her to perceive Malcolm and Martin not as "adversaries" in ideology, but as "companions" who marched different paths toward liberation for black peoples of the Americas and the world.
Early in the book, Cone offers a description of these freedom-fighters' childhood experiences. The joyful and painful benchmark moments for Malcolm X and Martin King are carefully examined. Through such a presentation the reader gains access to possible internal and external forces that may have predisposed both men for the particular journeys they traveled in the liberational movement.
The ideological premises upon which both freedom fighters stood are thoroughly compared. In a healthy overview of various beliefs held by Malcolm X (later El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and Martin King, the differing definitions of "liberation" are examined. More important, the author gives wonderful handles for perceiving the utility in differing methodologies for attaining black-American liberation.
Cone continues, asserting the phenomenal impact that both men's religious belief systems had on their public ministries. Cone illuminates the interrelatedness of race and religion for both leaders, helping us to see why an analysis of the freedom-fighters' ministries must include a disciplined review of the role that black-American religious views have played in the liberational movements of African Americans since our arrival to the colonies.
Cone provokes the reader into empathizing with Malcolm X's growing pains as he breaks away from his spiritual mentor, the honorable Elijah Mohammed, and encounters another Islamic way of life. The author provides an argument that demonstrates Malcolm X's and Martin King's similarities in black theologies and political ideologies.
SOME VERY provocative questions are raised in this book. Cone substantiates the arguments that some of King's views, affected as they were by great setbacks in the civil rights movement and America's involvement in Vietnam, began to mirror the sociopolitical rhetoric of Malcolm X.
Resourceful examples of these freedom fighters' methodologies for attaining black liberation for the masses are injected. The reader is reminded of the African-American quest for freedom through the centuries. Cone claims that both leaders were moving toward black liberation via the rich historical traditions of black freedom movements.
Martin and Malcolm and America registers scathing and affectionate evaluation of both freedom fighters as men with human weaknesses and strengths. The weaknesses include issues associated with how Malcolm X and M.L. King related to women, including women participating within the freedom-fighting movements. A glimpse into their successes and failures at articulating the role that economic variables play in the "overcoming" of racial inequities in the United States is provided as well.
As would be expected, the strengths are numerous. Through this phase of the biographical evaluations, the author quietly leads the reader to consider the proposition that it was necessary for these freedom fighters to perceive oppositional ideologies in order for their specific voices to be heard in the historic black liberation movement traditions.
I highly recommend this book to all those who believe in the idea of "racial reconciliation," and to those who assume that blacks and whites can work harmoniously together without acknowledging the 400 years of economic and social suffering that blacks have inherited and whites have benefited from.
Unless financial and social reparations are made by white Americans to black Americans, and unless black Americans continue to assume leadership roles for our own "uplift," the racial reconciliation idea will remain just that.
This book illuminates such a needed reminder to all of us!
Nathan E. Jernigan was a pastor, a doctoral candidate in theology at Howard University, and co-executive director of children and youth programs at Sojourners Neighborhood Center in Washington, D.C. when this review appeared.
Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or A Nightmare? By James H. Cone. Orbis Books.
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