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By James H. Cone. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991, xviii + 358 pp. $22.95, ISBN 0-88344-721-5.)
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X barely knew each other, meeting only once by chance at the United States Capitol in the spring of 1964. While both men were alive they disagreed fundamentally on the direction of the black struggle. In his solidly researched and illuminating book, Martin & Malcolm & America, James H. Cone does not gloss over these differences. From the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 through the March on Washington in 1963, Malcolm directed a steady stream of invective at the civil rights leader. King was a "religious Uncle Tom,"a "traitor,"a "chump," and a "fool." For his part King ignored Malcolm, refused to meet him or appear on the same platform with him, and privately "saw Malcolm as a hot-headed radical with a dangerous emotional appeal." Cone also rejects the romantic notion that had both men lived they would have joined forces to lead the movement into the 1970s: "It was not likely that [Malcolm] and Martin could have made a genuine coalition ... because of their mutual unwillingness to denounce their respective commitments to self-defense and nonviolence."
Cone maintains that, despite these apparently irreconcilable differences, near the end of their lives Malcolm and King were moving away from their rigid ideological positions and toward each other. There is, then, no need to choose between their two philosophies, and "We should never pit them against each other." That after his break with Elijah Muhammad and the nation of Islam Malcolm moved "closer to the mainstream of the civil rights movement" is well documented in his autobiography. Cone contends that King began to modify his views in the wake of the...