Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: James H. Cone’s book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. It has been more than 25 years since I read Rev. James H. Cone’s book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. I was teaching an English 101 course focused on the writing of the Civil Rights Movement, and I wanted to learn more about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X and to understand better the relationship between them, the intersection points, if any, between them. Of course, I’d already read Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his landmark “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and I’d read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But it was James H. Cone’s 1991 book, Martin & Malcolm & America, that helped me to deeply understand how the two seemingly diametrically opposed civil rights leaders were actually two sides of the same coin. There was so much more to say than that Dr. King preached nonviolence and that Malcolm X advocated violence. Indeed, it was not even accurate to say