I wrote in last month's Conquered Words that I had finished Martin Luther King Jr.'s autobiography. I mentioned in the post that there needs to be no other book on leadership "how to's" because King's intellectual and experiential prowess surpasses much of what I have read on the subject. In that post, I forgot to mention one of my favorite quotes, which I ran across again as I prepare one of my seminar papers, which is on the rhetoric of prison letters and, specifically his "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
In his account of the time leading up to his imprisonment, King remembers the distress he went through the night before. He knew was going to be arrested, but he didn't know how he was going to get out. The SCLC had run out of bail funds so it was unclear going in to prison if King would be allowed out in any legal way. He also realized that if he didn't go to jail, he would lose the attention that is required in non-violent protesting and forfeit the crucial stage of advance in Alabama. He writes of his decision process:
“I sat in the midst of the deepest quiet I have ever felt, with two dozen others in the room. There comes a time in the atmosphere of leadership when a man surrounded by loyal friends and allies realizes he has come face-to-face with himself and with ruthless reality. I was alone in that crowded room. I walked to another room in the back of the suite, and I stood in the center of the floor. I thought I was standing at the center of all that my life had brought me to be…my tortured mind leaped beyond the Gaston Motel…and I thought of the twenty million black people who dreamed that someday they might be able to cross the Red Sea of injustice and find their way into the promised land of integration and freedom. There was no room for doubt. I whispered to myself, 'I must go.' The doubt, the fear, the hesitation was gone.”-Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiograpy of Martin Luther King Jr. pgs. 182-183
2 comments:
I dunno, I mean, the man was readying himself to go to jail. That's a lonely experience that forces you to confront yourself whether you're in a position of leadership or not.
Also, leadership, and by extension teaching, suggests that you've already gone through the forest, to use your allusion. It's been hacked, it's just a matter of guiding everyone else through it. And any teacher will say that they never stop learning from their students, which, at least in my more limited experience, gives the leader tremendous comfort and company.
that is a big leap to me. While there exist multiple commonalities between the two, teaching and leadership are quite separable and I believe your comment exposes the separation. Teachers CAN be leaders, but they're often not. This is because teaching works with the passing down of the known, but leadership is never certain. It may involve the passing of knowledge, but it has more to do with mobilizing people in a certain direction when that direction is normally unknown or unseen by the group.
King is a great example of this: He hadn't seen "the promise land" or hacked his way through a civil rights movement ever before, but he had a vision (or dream, if you will *wink*) of what the world would look like without segregation. If the forest is already hacked and trotted over before, you're not leading, but just showing people a trail others have already blazed.
If the trail has already been mapped and cut through, then you're just teaching them where to watch their step. Leadership is more courageous than teaching. I would say that leaders are by default teachers, but I would never assume that teachers are leaders by default. True leadership involves the unknown.
King describes his loneliness resulting not from his fear of imprisonment, but his fear over whether he was making the right choice and going the right direction with this key decision in their path toward the promise land.
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