"To most Americans, Malcolm X and Dr. King represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. In his latest book, Peniel Joseph upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the 20th century's most iconic African American leaders, and addresses the complex and nuanced relationship between power and love in perhaps the defining American social justice movement of our times. In 'The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.', a dual biography of these two movement leaders, Joseph unpacks the false binaries through which they have been viewed to reveal their shared revolutionary path: in search of black dignity, citizenship, and human rights."
