Peniel E. Joseph - The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

O n Thursday, March 26, 1964, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. descended, separately, on the United States Senate building. Each dressed in a suit and tie, their similar sartorial choices reflecting a shared status as religious ministers and political leaders who paid sharp attention to their physical appearance. That day, the Senate debated the pending civil rights bill, with opponents of racial justice conducting a filibuster designed to prevent its passage. Their unplanned joint appearance recognized the US Senates deliberations as one of historys hinge points. The Senate debate centered on the fate of the bill, already passed by the House of Representatives, which was designed to end racial discrimination in public life. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 promised to bring the nation closer to multiracial democracy through the end of racial segregation. The proposed law guaranteed that restaurants, movie theaters, swimming pools, libraries, and amusement parks would no longer serve as markers of shame, humiliation, and unequal citizenship for black Americans. President Lyndon Johnson championed passage of the legislation in honor of the martyred John F. Kennedy, who had urged the nation and Congress to embrace civil rights as a moral issue in the months before his November 22, 1963, assassination in Dallas, Texas.

Malcolm and Martin attended the filibuster as participant observers in the nations unfolding civil rights saga. In a sense, they both sought to serve as witnesses to an ongoing historical drama they had actively shaped in their respective roles as national political leaders and mobilizers.

Kings presence among the spectators gallery added a buzz of excitement to the proceedings. He arrived in Washington as the single most influential civil rights leader in the nation. His I Have a Dream speech during the previous summers March on Washington catapulted him into the ranks of Americas unelected, yet no less official, moral and political leaders. Time magazine named him Man of the Year for 1963 and, unbeknownst to King at that moment, he stood on the cusp of being announced as a Nobel Prize recipient. King emerged as the most well-known leader of the Big Six national civil rights organizations, which included the NAACPs Roy Wilkins, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Urban Leagues Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced snick) chairman and future Georgia congressman John Lewis.

Kings Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) served primarily as a national mobilizer of local freedom struggles. The NAACP, the nations oldest civil rights group, marshaled its resources toward eradicating racism in law through a series of court cases that culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools, and local efforts to end discrimination in public accommodations and voting rights. Wilkinss measured approach to racial justice reflected his decades of operating in political terrain that waxed and waned between robust political progress and tragic setbacks. COREs roots in the radical pacifism of the Second World War found new life in the direct-action demonstrations of the early 1960s. The avuncular, baritone-voiced Farmer endured stints in jail alongside young student activists and was confident enough to debate anyone who couched his militant nonviolence as passive or weak. The Urban League defined racial justice as opening the doors of economic opportunity within a system of American capitalism that Young fervently believed held the key to black freedom. A. Philip Randolph served as the dean of the black freedom struggle. Tall, courtly, and intelligent, Randolph began his ascent into black politics as a radical socialist during the First World War, before adopting a militant pragmatism as a labor leader bold enough to threaten a march of ten thousand black men on Washingtona march that was halted only after Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order banning discrimination in the military. SNCC was the wild card within the Big Six. Organized by Ella Baker, a King colleague and ally turned political adversary, SNCC helped to radicalize the entire movement through its courageous activism in the most dangerous parts of the South, exemplified by Chairman John Lewiss willful insistence of putting his body on the line and receiving the battle scars to prove it. In the American political imaginationand to the chagrin of his colleaguesKing was the one who personified the struggle for racial justice, civil rights, and black citizenship around the nation.