We recently had the privilege of hosting an Awakin Call with Peniel Joseph, author and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas-Austin.

To most Americans, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. In his latest book, Dr. Peniel Joseph upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the 20th century's most iconic African American leaders, addressing the complex relationship between power and love in the defining American social justice movement of our times. Joseph reveals how both leaders furthered or clarified each other’s message. A scholar-activist, teacher, and leading public voice on race issues, Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin, and has spent much of his career bringing to life the people and the web of relationships and strategies that marked the civil rights era.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me ...

On Writing and the Art of Biography: "I have done oral histories and interviewed tons of people and you just get deeper and deeper humility from hearing people's experiences, you become more vulnerable, which is a good thing. ... I think the artistry comes in a few ways, one trying to write in a way that people can understand .... [Y]ou are not trying to exclude people. You are not trying to use highfalutin language. You are trying to make it plain, like Malcolm X would say. ... And another part of the artistry is really trying to say that and show people that it is ordinary people that make history, not extraordinary people. So even as you have Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, or Angela Davis, Ella Baker, they would not have been powerful without people who supported them, and took risks and were not in the limelight. And so, from that perspective, I think the art comes in there, like, how do we convey this and how do we teach this to new generations of people? ... [W]hat you are trying to do is always look beyond the surface. You are trying to look beyond the official story and, I think that's where art is really important .... I think music a lot of times from this period is able to convey more to us than we are able to write ourselves. And that's why art is so important because there is only so much, even as I am somebody who practices words, saying and writing, but words have limits, right?"

What is Black Power as a sub-field of American history v. civil rights: "[B]lack power and civil rights are on the same family tree, but they're going to be different branches that sometimes intersect and intertwine. ... [T]he difference between black power and civil rights is that black power offers this radical epistemological intervention. ... So you're not trying to utilize Western theory or Western civilization or a Western lens to explain the wants and needs, the hopes and dreams, of black people and to also to create a liberatory or liberation practice for black people or practices for black people. So that's where black power really differentiates. ... I think black power, more than civil rights, although it affected civil rights in this way, and we saw this with Malcolm X, black power has a profound criticism and critique of white supremacy and structural racism and violence, and the way in which that connects to colonialism in Africa and in India and around the world. So black power is where you get this idea in connecting to the third world, connecting to this global human rights movement."

King's Time in India -- Becoming a Nonviolent Revolutionary: "his time in India profoundly, profoundly changes Dr. King. His seeing both the prosperity and the poverty because India has both. ... [S]eeing that kind of poverty in India really made Dr. King realize that he was going to try to utilize nonviolent civil disobedience to coerce the entire world to change, the world to change. And again, I use that word coercion on purpose because he's a nonviolent revolutionary who's trying to shame and force change. Because that's what revolutionaries do. So King is not coming with a curse word. He's not going to engage in a fist fight. He's not bringing a knife or a gun to Washington DC, but he absolutely is saying that we all must change. That's why he's a revolutionary. ...

"So King is a provocateur. It's just that we conflate radicalism and revolutionary politics with those who are willing to use violence. I tell my students that all the time, that's a major, major mistake. You can be a radical figure. You can be a revolutionary figure because it's not about the means, it's about the ends. If you're saying the new society, that is your goal, is going to be a Beloved Community free of racial injustice, free of economic inequality, free of violence. That is what? That's a revolution! If King is saying we're going to treat immigrants like we treat American citizens, guess what? That's a revolution because we don't do it now. King is saying, we're not going to go to war to do this. We're going to organize and we're going to, yes, do civil disobedience. And he says at the March on Washington, we're going to have to be willing to go to jail together because King realizes it's an unjust society in an unjust world, but like Gandhi, he says, if we're going to organize and we do enough, we're going to topple empires nonviolently."

Dr. King moves toward Malcolm X's revolutionary aims, nonviolently: "Dr. King and Malcolm X serve as each other's alter ego. So instead of thinking of them as polarities and as opposites and diametrically opposed, and at war with each other, we see that they start off as combatants, they become rivals, but then they have mutual respect for each other and certainly after Malcolm's assassination, King absolutely imbibes the notion of black power, nonviolently. He actually -- he absolutely drinks the Kool-Aid of anti-imperialism, nonviolently. ...

"So Dr. King starts to speak like Malcolm X, Malcolm famously -- and I call Malcolm black America's prosecuting attorney -- had always charged white America with a series of crimes against black humanity. I'll say it again. Malcolm charged white America with a series of crimes against black humanity that dated back to racial slavery and continued in his own time. By 1967/68, guess what? Dr. King is charging white America with crimes against black humanity. And he's saying it publicly. That's why there are no more lunches with LBJ. There's no more White House visits. When you speak the truth to power, the New York Times is calling Dr. King, a Nobel Prize winner, a buffoon, and, basically, a 'koon'. ... Dr. King's polling numbers among whites plummet ...

"King, following Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, starts to speak the truth. He's an incredible figure who evolves. So he doesn't start off as a revolutionary, not at all. That's Malcolm, the person who starts off as a revolutionary. Now Malcolm opens and expands that revolutionary mind and heart to understand a deeper lesson about human rights. King becomes a political revolutionary, especially in the aftermath of the Watts rebellion in 1965 when King travels to Watts, Los Angeles and sees the mayhem that's created by law enforcement, and racism and segregation and poverty. He's off the Great Society train. He is off the mainstream train. He's off the liberal neoliberal framework that he had been a part of, even as he had a private critique of, and publicly he starts to express the kind of disapproval that leads to his assassination."

Love remains the animating force in Dr. King's ethic, but in a pragmatic way that translates to policies and people: "Dr. King is imbibing the social gospel. He's listening to Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, the Old and the New Testaments. One of his biographers calls him a “pillar of fire”. Dr. King is Moses. He's Jeremiah. He's Amos. So, he's doing all of those things. I mean, the idea of justice being what love looks like in public ....

"But King is also very, very, empathetic, and pragmatic and understands that this is not just about God and Christ and spirituality. It is not just about hearts and minds. It is also about policies and people and structures, and we must holistically include all those things. In his early career, he tried to at times lead with love and then in the second part of his career, he tried to lead with hearts and minds. In the final part of his career, he tries to holistically do all three – love, hearts and minds, but also policies and the law and the secular arena in a big, big way. So, I do think the revolution in terms of nonviolence is us creating a love ethic. When he talks about a soul force, and when he talks about a revolution of values and certainly that nonviolent revolution would lead to the Beloved Community. The Beloved Community is a community of humanity and human rights and sisterhood and brotherhood that transcends racial and class and ethnic and sexuality and gender divisions.

"It absolutely does. But what he does brilliantly is coalesce all those things. The problem with the global church and clergy and even spiritual leaders, policy leaders, and grassroots leaders and nonprofit leaders and elected officials, in the tech industry, is that people silo those things. They do not think that you can build a just society that has all those things together. King makes an argument that you can. .... He was doing all of the above, at the same time. and that becomes really powerful. That is what we should be doing as well. I do not think you can just lead with one of those things. I think you have to lead with all of them simultaneously."

Faith as Dr. King's source of power; vulnerability and deep inner connection as power, but only if you can do the hard work of avoiding paralysis and knit yourself back together: "I think that for King -- he finds his ballast in his faith. He finds his ballast in his family, too, in Coretta and his four children. Coretta Scott King was really a political partner, certainly his wife, his spouse, but somebody who he's learning from and who he's got a great political partnership with. And so I think for those of us, yeah, I mean, those of us who are on this call who think about issues of spirituality and religion and faith and inner consciousness, that's very, very important. I think you're not going to have the kind of external revolution of values and building the Beloved Community that you might want without that change within you. And that's a process, it's a lifelong process, that change. And some people are gonna find it through spirituality. Some are gonna find it through religious faith. Some are gonna find it through their family. But it's really something that gives you [strength].

"Because I think what a lot of us fear, is a vulnerability, personally, that you can't escape from. And what that means is a vulnerability that somehow makes you unable to function in a society that has so much grief and misery. And a vulnerability that makes you no longer able to see the beauty and the positive side of society and the optimism.Which is why a lot of people, they keep the veil up and they keep the mask up. You know, Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask." You just keep that mask up. And sometimes people are unable to take that mask off for their spouses, their lovers, their children, their friends. You know what I mean? Because they fear that if they were to ever take that mask off and really expose themselves vulnerably and open-heartedly to the misery of the world, they would never be able to once again partake in the beauty of the world. ...

"[P]ersonally people feel that if they are that vulnerable, they're going to be torn asunder. And I think what King grapples with is that vulnerability, which he does have, but knitting himself back together, to wear and put that suit and tie on, and wear that democratic armor to go out and fight the good fight day after day after day. ...

"I think that we are all tasked with trying to build a higher consciousness that makes us, paradoxically, both more vulnerable and more powerful. Because your power lies in that vulnerability to share and be a witness to the suffering that's happening in the world. But to somehow not allow that vulnerability to be so all consuming that you are paralyzed. ... [T]he world and life is not all of one thing. That you have to be able to find balance, not even so much as compartmentalize, but find a balance and see that we represent everything. We are in the mystery of life. We represent the good, the bad, the vulnerable, the strong, the weak, the shortcomings, the successes, the failures. And that's tough to wrap around. But I think that Dr. King -- he, like all of us, struggles with it. And you can see it in his writings. ... So he suffers, but he definitely calls himself forth to that aspirational consciousness, the inner work that you have to do that would go alongside the revolution of values and the Beloved Community that we would see publicly. So there's real deep inner work that he does."

Malcolm X also does inner work later in his career and comes around to seeing the validity of Dr. King's ways: "And Malcolm X, obviously, very famously does this inner work in 1964. I mean, he had tried earlier, but in '64 he takes the Hajj pilgrimage. He spends five weeks overseas in one trip and then nineteen weeks in the other. So he spent six months abroad -- Middle East and Africa. And he's got a travel diary where you can see him struggling to become this Muslim, this Orthodox Muslim, this person who believes in human rights for all people, who's critical of racism, who thinks about the civil rights movement in a much more expanded way, which is why he comes and he wants to meet with Dr. King. They met only once, but he actually goes in December and sees King speak in Harlem on December 17th, 1964, after King wins the Nobel Peace Prize. So Malcolm is constantly working on that inner consciousness and working on becoming more and more vulnerable so that actually he can achieve more power through that vulnerability. ...

"And when you think about the love ethic, I think that as a Muslim, he had always talked about being Muslim, and Islam is something that was about human rights and social justice. But as he gets deeper into his Muslim faith, leads the Nation of Islam, and takes the hajj to Mecca, and really comes under the tutelage of Muslim scholars and Muslim imams and really, really, very deeply, imbibes this, you start to see him talking about how his Muslim faith can be part of creating that global love ethic and that human rights revolution."

Whether black liberation can be achieved in America v. need for exodus or pan-African vision: "I don't think exodus is the answer, although I understand why there have been people who expatriated, including Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, and really, you know, thousands of other folks over the course of centuries.

"I think black folks built the United States. They built global democracy, they built global capitalism, their labor built it, right? They're not the designers or the architects, but their labor and their bodies themselves were exploited and used as literal credit and collateral for capital investments from New York City to California and beyond. And we can see that in Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton and a bunch of other books.

"So I think that the lessons that we have from Dr. King, from Malcolm X, from the Black Lives Matter Movement now, is that the struggle continues. We have to struggle to fight here. And I do think that that internal consciousness is really, really important."

Trauma lens needs to be accompanied by cultivation of joy: "I think trauma is really, really important and I think that work is important. I think that we have to connect that work to the work that's also being done about, and there's a new book about this, on black joy, and sort of the black ecstatic too alongside of it. ... So trauma is absolutely one lens that is a credible lens, but we have to balance that trauma lens alongside of joy, even intersecting with trauma, because that's how black people have survived. When you think about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Ida B Wells and Frederick Douglass, it was trauma, but they also re-imagined the world and they had a defiant optimism that was rooted in a love ethic, and was rooted in a service ethic, and was rooted in them understanding that they were individual human beings with human rights, and their deep faith, at times Christian faith, other faiths. ...

"So that trauma lens is important, but we also have to look at how do we cultivate black joy? And some people are doing this with a scholarship on African foodways and African diaspora foodways and food justice, amidst this traumatic environment. Amidst the trauma of gunfire, West side, North, South side of Chicago. My brother's an ER doctor who's faced these challenges. Amidst all of that, we have to think about black joy as well, and not just put us in that silo of trauma, but that lens is usually important."

On the importance of daily personal practices to stay morally grounded: "I've been practicing yoga for almost 20 years and I do mindfulness and meditation, I do prayer and then I start my morning off. I started this morning like that. And I do that absolutely religiously, it is a daily practice, 365 days a year. And I think that since I started doing that, I started doing that in my twenties, it really, really helped, and I think that doing a daily practice of that kind of meditation really helped me in terms of ... I think we're all searching for humility. I think we all need to be humble. And I think because of our egos, which you also need to have the confidence to be in the world, it's always a struggle, it's always a struggle. And I think the daily practices really help me in that sense, in terms of embracing your own vulnerability, embracing humility, embracing that we don't know everything, trying to be aligned with the great moral truths of our time, trying to be aligned. ...

"King did not think of Southern segregationist as enemies, but King was also not ready to unify with Southern segregationists under a false peace treaty while they still were interested in anti-black violence and anti-black racism. So it's important for us to ... we can still hold on to our moral values and our political values. Not see people as enemies, but also not capitulate. Because, I think the Bible gives us this lesson and any different religious practice, whether you're thinking about the Qur'an or the Bible or the Torah, or just spirituality, is that we have to hold on and not be cleaved or unmoored from our own moral practices. So if you feel that your practice is non-violence, your practice is a search for justice that's rooted in the protection of life and the investment in life, and the nourishment of life, of people, but also animals of the planet, you have to stay firm there."

Expanding our moral universe, but balancing that with particular action: "One of the problems of the United States, and one of the problems in global civil society, or uncivil society, during this time, is that we all have a moral circle that is so tiny, that we can have these enemy politics. Dr. King challenged us to have a moral circle that was as vast as the universe. Because once that moral circle is that large, you are actually concerned, concerned deeply and empathetically, on a cellular level, about the problems of other people, the hunger of other children -- children that are not your own. ...

"[King] says that his visit to India showed him that what happens in India was connected to what happens in the United States, what happens in South Africa is connected to what's happening in Harlem. When you realize that, then you're going to be in a whole different space. And then it becomes like we were talking about earlier, how do you balance this? Once you have that kind of vulnerability, it does need balance because you can be short-circuited and sometimes, like I said, it happens to young people, but it happens to middle age and older people. Sometimes people get woke and they become woke, right? They find out "wow, remember the matrix", red pill, blue pill, you take the pill and there's all this suffering and you can no longer see the beauty. King and Malcolm X at their best, they see both. ...

"Americans, especially, get caught up in quick fixes. And like Dr. King told us -- materialism, racism, militarism -- this is not something you achieve one day, it's a constant struggle, and we have to be fine with that. We actually have to be. And I think it's the same for the Beloved Community. It's not something that there's a destination and an end point. We're always going to be refining. If we get a guaranteed income for every single person in United States and a floor of Medicare for all, for every single person in the United States, our next struggle is going to be "well, what about the rest of the world?" So this is going to be never ending and we have to find some grace within that struggle. We have to allow ourselves some grace within that struggle. ...

"[W]e are on the precipice of building that Beloved Community. We just have to understand that there are these forces, very violent, very dark forces, that are in opposition. And what we need to do -- the strength of power that we have -- is in our numbers, in our resilience, in our confidence, but also in our ability to be service-oriented leaders who know that Dr. King said we could all be great because we could all be of service. We have to continue to be intellectually curious. We have to continue to do daily practices that really provide a deep way for us to contextualize all that's happening, but give us a place of humility that we can start each day from."

The black liberation struggle as a universal struggle: [W]e have to remember when we say human rights, what Dr. King wanted human rights and what Malcolm wanted too, is that they understand we can achieve universal justice, but through the particular lens of black struggle, see? 'Cause people sometimes don't understand that a black movement can be a universal movement. The only think that George Washington in 1776 can be universal, but Nelson Mandela cannot be. But he can be, right? But a Chilean revolutionary who's a lesbian can be universal as well. That's the whole thing. So Shakespeare is not the only universal person. Right? You know, Shakespeare is not the .... Black and queer and Mexican and indigenous authors -- their story is our story too. The only reason we don't think so is because of the paradigm and the framework of white supremacy, that we've all imbibed, including activists and anti-racists, because they didn't give us those books. They didn't give us those movies."

Doing our small bit and using our "supply chains of power and privilege" to stand up for justice: "[King] says that ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus. Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? And so what I think we should be doing in terms of using both our political sword and shields is really understanding that there's never a bad time to do right in the world. There's never a bad time. So those of us who may be told to wait, and it's going to be a more propitious time, there's never a bad time. And this idea of Dr. King saying that a true leader is a molder of consensus and not just somebody who's searching for consensus -- again, through the power of our example, and we can do this in a number of different ways. Everybody who's on this call has a supply chain of power and privilege that they're connected to. And there are supply chains of grief and misery. And all of us can amplify those supply chains of power and privilege -- whether it's in our children's schools (this is going beyond the vote), whether it's in our churches, whether it's in our networks that are social or professional -- to center the issues that we were talking about. ... [T]his is not just the economic or physical resources that we can provide, but these are our internal resources that we can provide, to these supply chain networks. ...

"So we have to decide, how do we want to use the expertise and the talents that we have to promote justice wherever we may be? None of us should feel disempowered. None of us should feel that that's going to be left to the politicians or the entrepreneurs or people who have more money than me, because all of us have resources. All of us have resources."

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Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!