Peniel Joseph – författare

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and'60s is now remembered as a distant, sepia-toned campaign, whose achievements and idealism were soon eclipsed by angry, confrontational Black Power activists. However, far from marking the end of an era, as is commonly thought, the 1965 Voting Rights Act wrested open a dam holding back radical political impulses. This political explosion initially took the form of the Black Power Movement, which, though conventionally adjudged a failure, in fact laid the groundwork for a crucial new wave of black leadership culminating in the inauguration of Barack Obama. In Dark Days, Bright Nights , acclaimed scholar Peniel E. Joseph elucidates Black Power's forgotten achievements by retelling the story of the movement through the lives of activists, intellectuals, and artists including Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, and Barack Obama. In so doing, Joseph re-assesses a half-century fraught with struggle to expose the Black Power movement's resounding triumphs and continuing influence on American democracy.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are the two most iconic figures of the Civil Rights movement. To most Americans, Malcolm and Martin represent contrasting political ideals -- self-defense vs. non-violence, anger vs. pacifism, separatism vs. integration, the sword vs. the shield. The Civil Rights movement itself has suffered the same fate: while non-violent direct action is remembered today as an unalloyed good and an unassailable part of our democracy, the movement's combative militancy has been either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, acclaimed historian Peniel Joseph offers a dual biography of Malcolm and Martin and a more nuanced narrative that pushes us to completely reconsider these two leaders as well as the era they came to define. The Sword and the Shield reimagines Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. not as antagonists, but as two political revolutionaries who confronted the same problem from different perspectives. Examining their political lives next to one another provides a more complicated, but ultimately more satisfying, understanding of these men and the times they shaped. Despite markedly different family histories, religious affiliations, and class backgrounds, Malcolm and Martin found common ground on a wide range of issues. Each inspired the other to engage political views that he had rejected in the past. Malcolm's push to connect pan-Africanism to an international human rights agenda mirrored the multiculturalism that Martin eloquently articulated at the March on Washington. Similarly, the anti-war activism and anti-poverty campaigns of Martin's final years unleashed a stinging critique of racism, militarism, and materialism that echoed Malcolm's impassioned anti-colonialism. In short, King was more revolutionary, and Malcolm more pragmatic, than we've been told. This will stand as the definitive dual history of these two lives for years to come.

To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense versus nonviolence, Black Power versus civil rights, the sword versus the shield. The struggle for Black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright.In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. Now updated with a new afterword, this is a strikingly revisionist account of Malcolm and Martin, the era they defined, and their lasting impact on today's Movement for Black Lives.

A kaleidoscopic narrative history of 1963, the pivotal moment in America's long civil rights movement-the year of the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and the assassinations of Medgar Evers and John F. KennedyIn Freedom Season, acclaimed historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a stirring narrative history of 1963, marking it as the defining year of the Black freedom struggle-a year when America faced a deluge of political strife and violence and emerged transformed.Nineteen sixty-three opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. The months in between brought waves of racial terror, mass protest, and police repression that shocked the world, inspired radicals and reformers, and forced the hands of moderate legislators. By year's end the murders of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and four Black girls at a church in Alabama left the nation determined to imagine a new way forward. Alongside the stories of historical giants like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph uplifts the perspectives of less celebrated leaders like playwright Lorraine Hansberry and activist Gloria Richardson.Over one heartbreakingly tumultuous year, America unraveled and remade itself as the world looked on. Freedom Season shows how the upheavals of 1963 planted the seeds for watershed civil rights legislation and renewed hope in the promise and possibility of freedom.