Louis A. Decaro

John Brown was first and foremost a religious warrior, a Christian jihadist, committed to the duality of spiritual and military struggle. Decaro gets this, and helpfully focuses on the fine religious distinctions between various strains of Christianity in John Brown's life prior to Kansas, and the evolution of his religious thinking. This is really key to understanding what happens later at Harper's Ferry. Unlike other biographers, who are sometimes only nominally sympathetic to Brown, Decaro's attitude is unequivocally favorable. He grasps that John Brown was right about the need to oppose slavery with violence, and that all the equivocating pacifist abolitionists were simply wrong and behind their times. While this book is less useful than some others as an event by event chronicle, it does cover all of the major milestones. In its grasp of the early John Brown and the cultural and religious context of his life this is the best of several John Brown biographies I've recently read.… (meer)

This book will surely find its way onto every short list of indispensable sources for understanding the life and work of Malcolm X. The religious dimension of the work is rightly emphasized, and in this dimension it is an important addition to James Cone's groundbreaking Martin & Malcolm & America. But it is also important for the clarity with which it presents Malcolm's Garveyite roots and internationalist perspective, both factors that owe more to his family than to the Nation of Islam. Those roots help explain Malcolm's development toward Sunni orthodoxy in the context of his Panafrican commitment. Attending to them should help correct the provincial interpretation to which Malcolm has so often been subjected-by both detractors and admirers. DeCaro carefully traces Malcolm's spiritual development from the Garveyite teaching of his parents and pluralist religious toleration of his mother through his involvement with the cultic and exclusive Nation of Islam to his full embrace of orthodox Islam before, during, and after his pilgrimage to Mecca. The whole life, as DeCaro reads it, is one of Islam, a submission that is marked by continuous conversion. DeCaro's work is scholarly and thorough, but it is also accessible; it will deepen both the popular and scholarly appreciation of Malcolm X and his contribution to the unfinished work of human liberation.… (meer)

Louis DeCaro describes the motivation for this book as "pastoral." This motivation is clear in the book's tone, but it does not exclude equally important prophetic and scholarly dimensions. This volume continues DeCaro's work on the religious biography of Malcolm X (On the Side of My People, NYU Press, 1996), shifting from the continuity of Islam in his development to the impact of Christianity-particularly in its distorted form as "white" Christianity. Here, as in his previous work, DeCaro pays tribute to the influence of Louise Little, Malcolm's mother, who consistently modelled an open but critical embrace of plural religious and spiritual traditions that avoided the destructive fanaticism of religiosity. That open embrace, in fact, is the basis for DeCaro's critical assessment of both the Nation of Islam and "white" Christianity. He expects the book to make people angry, and he is probably right; that is hardly surprising for a book true to the spirit of Malcolm X. Readers will come away from DeCaro's work with a better understanding of Malcolm X (and with a better understanding of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farakhan, and Billy Graham), but also perhaps with a greater appreciation for the revolutionary potential of religious ideas in confrontation with religious distortions that have sustained racism in the United States throughout its history. If that appreciation leads to embrace and application in practice, both DeCaro's pastoral and his prophetic motivations will have been well served.… (meer)