In Conversation: Malcolm X, Dr. King & the Time for Change

Joy-Ann Reid is a political analyst for MSNBC and host of “The ReidOut,” which was launched in July 20 and air weeknights at 7 p.m. ET. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story; Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons and the Racial Divide, and We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, hich she co-edited with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. She also hosts the podcast “Reid This-Reid That” with veteran journalist Jacque Reid and a book podcast called “What to Reid.”

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is the President & Sr. Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: Bishop with the College of Affirming Bishops and Faith Leaders; Pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and the author of three books. Rev. Dr. Barber currently sits on the National NAACP Board of Directors. In We Are Called to Be a Movement (Workman Publishing Company), Rev. Barber, in a single, rousing sermon, makes an impassioned argument whose message could not be clearer: It’s time for change, and the time needs you. It’s time to come together and renounce the politics of rejection, division, and greed. It’s time to lift up the common good, move up to higher ground, and revive the heart of democracy. The Nation called Barber ” one of the most gifted organizers and orators in the country today.”

Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written several previous books on African American history, including Stokely: A Life. In the dual biography The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph upends longstanding preconceptions of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders. His is a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. This is a strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and the era they came to define. Author, Georgetown University sociology professor, New York Times contributing opinion writer, and contributing editor of The New Republic Dr. Michael Eric Dyson called it “a masterwork of bold historical revisionism that will change how we think of the dynamic relationship between Harlem’s Hero Malcolm X, and America’s Apostle Martin Luther King, Jr.”