BOOK REVIEW : Well-Rounded Look at Two Black Heroes : MARTIN & MALCOLM & AMERICA: A Dream or a Nightmare <i> by James H. Cone</i> , Orbis Books, $22.95, 358 pages

When public figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are transformed into cultural objects decades after their deaths, the challenge of breaking through canonization to recover the sense of these men as actors in history becomes all the more difficult.

For example, Malcolm X’s oldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, says of her father: “He’s getting attention, but I think he’s misunderstood. . . . Young people are inspired by pieces of him instead of the entire man.”

James H. Cone, author of “Malcolm & Martin & America,” is to be commended for offering us a comparative study of these men in their entirety.

His book is a charting of the personal and philosophical evolution of King and Malcolm, an examination intended to restore the contradictory details and unique biographical elements that made one man an apostle of love and integration, and the other the principal spokesman of our time for black pride and separatism.

King’s vision, says Cone, sprang from “the American Dream,” and Malcolm’s from the “nightmare” of racial oppression in the north.

For King, the son of a prominent minister in Atlanta’s black middle-class community, early childhood was so lacking in racial conflict that he could write in 1949: “It is quite easy for me to think of the universe as basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting heredity and environmental circumstances.” He leaned “more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature mainly because of my childhood experiences.”

Such favorable beginnings produced a man who, after his years at Crozen Seminary and Boston University, was as comfortable with Hegel as he was with the black Baptist tradition--a scholar much admired by his teachers, and who had many job offers and the option of becoming a pastor or a professor.

It is inevitable, Cone argues, that such a man would see segregation as the only barrier to black success in the white world and later tell African-American audiences: “If you’re setting out to do a good Negro’s job . . . you’ve already flunked your matriculation exam for entrance into the university of integration.”

At the remarkably young age of 26, King was thrust to the forefront of the civil rights movement by the now-famous Montgomery bus boycott. Although no man was better prepared to appeal to the humanity in white America and to articulate the black demand for freedom, King struggled with the role given him by history, and once confessed: “At times, I think I’m a pretty unprepared symbol.”

Nevertheless, his resolve to serve and suffer led not only to his placing himself on the firing-line for racial justice, but also to the development of a social philosophy that, with the greatest intellectual sophistication, emphasized the interrelatedness of life and “inescapable network of mutuality” that bound all people in “a single garment of destiny.”

He wrote: “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

In vivid contrast to King’s upbringing, Malcolm X’s early life was a “nightmare” of poverty and brutality. There was violence between his father and mother, and toward their children.

His family was driven out of Omaha by the Ku Klux Klan. After his father’s death, his mother had a mental breakdown and was placed in a state hospital in Michigan, and her eight children became “state children.”

While he was a bright student in school, Malcolm’s eighth-grade teacher “discouraged him from becoming a lawyer and suggested carpentry as a more ‘realistic goal for a nigger.’ ”

Malcolm later reflected: “If Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie.”

Anger at Ostrowski and the black middle-class propelled Malcolm, as he reports in his famous autobiography, into the urban black underworld of Harlem, where he became “one of the most depraved parasitical hustlers” of his time, then into prison, where he encountered the teachings of Muhammad.

But even after his conversation, Cone writes, “Malcolm’s early life . . . made it difficult for him to trust not only whites, but blacks as well, including associates in the Black Muslims and later the ones who separated with him. He kept people at a distance.”

Cone has written a fair and balanced comparison of these two black heroes, one that shows how they influenced each other, and how their intellectual paths crossed. However, for this reviewer, it is a prescient statement by King that lingers as most significant for race relations in the 1990s.

“I think it would be dangerous and even tragic,” King said, “if the struggle in the United States for civil rights degenerated to a racial struggle of blacks against whites.”

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Long Ago in France” by M.F.K. Fisher (Prentice Hall Press).