Introduction
Leaders are of many types depending on their vision and leadership style. Generally, revolutionary movements are lead by charismatic leaders and there are many kinds of charismatic leaders. The U.S. Civil Rights Movement exposed leaders with a wide range of styles from the preacherly Martin Luther King to the radical Malcolm X (Aminzade et al, 2001). The visions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were revolutionary and it is for the visions they offered in their initial years of leadership for which they are best remembered (Emerson and Woo, 2006).
They were both thrust into national leadership roles at extremely young ages, sharing common goals of fighting oppression. However, their philosophies were different. Dr. King organized freedom rides and protest marches to abolish segregation and he favored integration between whites and blacks. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, on the other hand, believed that the races should live separately. While Dr. King followed a philosophy of nonviolence, Malcolm believed that a black man has the right to defend himself when attacked.
Thesis: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both charismatic leaders, but the latter was more of a transformational leader as well because of his idealistic views and his ability to inspire his followers to transcend above their normal limiting perceptions of black freedom and emancipation.
Background to the leaders
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were sons of politically active Baptist ministers who saw religion as a tool for social transformation. Both were well-informed about the relationship between the black freedom struggle and Third World liberation movements, and both were men of integrity and courage (Carson, 1998). In the late 1950s and 1960s, for the first time in the nation’s history, African American leaders rose to positions of great influence that they were able to share their vision of an equal world with both whites and non-whites.
Martin Luther King was born into the relative security of the black middle class in Atlanta and he felt a strong desire to serve humanity, and he was influenced most by the black church tradition. Malcolm X was born into a poor family. His father, a black Baptist minister, never served a prestigious church or even had a permanent parish. The welfare workers drove his mother insane and split up the children after she was committed to a mental institution (Cushman-Wood, 1993)). These experiences were the reasons behind his distrust in America.
Similarities
Leadership can be studied in two dimensions: task orientation and people orientation. Task oriented leaders are concerned about completing a task successfully through careful planning and utilization of resources. They are called as pragmatic or rationalized leaders. People oriented leaders have the ability to evoke emotional states in people, like those of motivation, commitment or identification with a leader, a movement or goal.
People oriented leaders are sometimes called as visionary leaders or charismatic leaders. John Henrik Clarke, comparing the oratory skills of the two great leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. said that anyone who listened to King was emotionally moved by these words but they did not remember the details of his speech (Smallwood, 2007). But, those who heard Malcolm X speak were able to recall his arguments and the facts he quoted (Smallwood, 2007).
Malcolm was more of a task oriented leader, King was more of a people oriented leader. However, both King and Malcolm were charismatic leaders. Patricia Wasielewski, after studying the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, finds them to be charismatic leaders as they had the ability to evoke, revoke and reframe emotions of their followers (Aminzade et al, 2001). They evoked emotions by creating a community of feeling; revoked emotions by creating making followers rethink their worldviews and reframed emotions by introducing new meaning structures to reshape their followers’ interpretations of the world (Aminzade et al, 2001). Both of them had the ability to deliver powerful speeches that stirred their followers.
Martin King Luther Jr.
King was a reluctant leader. He was never ambitious or entrepreneurial. Andrew Young, King’s Lieutenant once remarked: “I’m convinced that Martin never wanted to be a leader…everything he did, he was pushed into”. Yet he proved to be a great leader who was able to mobilize an entire nation. The lyrical poetry in his words and the power of his convictions made everyone take notice of Luther King. Michael Dizaar, on listening to his speech, expresses it most clearly: “The words just stayed there in the air, you know, as he talked” (PBS, 2004). He was a leader who tried to transform and restructure the whole of American society by taking a holistic view on issues.
He took many risks such as going to Birmingham, the hotspot of racism. He was a strong decision maker and often took decisions that were not popular among his friends. When he started on a mission of fighting for the poorer people of America, he was accused of abandoning his main commitment to the black community. But he was undeterred in his fight for the poor and working-class people that included both whites and blacks. This earned him risk the animosity of the rich people in both the communities. Next, in taking up the cause of the Vietnam War, Dr. King took a stand against the government.
He took the final risk in going to Memphis, Tennessee in April 1968 to support a strike of garbage workers and decision lead to his assassination. This underlined his risk taking capabilities and strong determined character. Dr. Martin Luther King also assumed too many roles in his life – roles that sometimes conflicted with each other. His role as a political activist required him to organize marches, protests, and boycotts in various places.
His role as a clergyman seemed to go against it as many clergymen felt that as a preacher he should just talk about Jesus Christ and the Bible. According to Dr. Martin Luther King he believed more in following the inner meaning of the Bible rather than just preaching the contents of the Bible. He was truly a man of integrity who believed in acting out his beliefs.
Martin Luther King was a charismatic leader who combined these qualities with “inspirational motivation”, the ability to articulate a vision for the group’s future and “intellectual stimulation”, questioning old ways and stimulating the exploration of new ones. Charismatic or transformational leaders inspire identification with themselves as persons and with their ideas and goals. Followers desire to be like their leaders and reach goals set by the leader.
Transformational and charismatic theories of leadership are based on the Freudian thought that people form intense emotional bonds with leaders at the psychological level. Transformational leadership is a leadership process which is very relevant in the context of societies in transition. James Burns defined it as the engagement of one person, the leader, with others, the followers, in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.
Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman (2004) identify six qualities of a transformational leader: knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. John Sosik identifies the habits of transformational leaders as those who can provide intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation and idealized influence. These habits underscore the capacity of transformational leadership to shape, alter and elevate. Martin Luther King Jr. was a charismatic and transformational leader.
A critical task for transformational political leaders is to construct group identities for followers that are both appealing and consistent with a leader’s goals. Next, the leaders must actively construct context and identity that reconfigures the social world in such a way that political leaders become prototypes of group identities and their projects accepted by group members. Finally, by articulating future collective states, leaders can inspire hope for improvement even when current situations are dismal (Lord and Brown, 2004).
Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader who followed all these steps to transformational leadership. In the 1950 and 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. linked his anti-segregation activities with moral values that had broad appeal, arguing that individuals had a moral right and responsibility to disobey unjust laws (Lord and Brown, 2004). He adopted a nonviolent approach to African-American civil rights activities and was arrested for peaceful demonstrations in Birmingham.
He risked police brutality and this enhanced his moral position and that of the African-American civil rights movement. These activities allowed him to create an ideal set of values – justice, nonviolence and equal rights in public accommodation and employment -that had broad appeal to his followers (Lord and Brown, 2004). His “I have a dream” speech delivered on August 28, 1963 articulated a future state of the nation in which people would be treated as equals regardless of their color and be judged by their character and not by the color of their skin (Lord and Brown, 2004).
Thus Martin Luther King Jr. was successful in actively constructing a new identity for African Americans and a new social order for the nation by appealing to core values expressed in the Constitution ‘that all men are created equal’ and by describing a more appealing future identity for followers. King’s vision focused on a future ideal and not on the current situation thereby inspiring civil rights advocates to keep on striving. In the last speech he gave before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King, Jr. told his audience that he wanted to do God’s will, that he had been to the mountain top and seen the promised land: “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. … I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” (Hall, 2001). King’s powerful rhetoric said something about both himself and the future of his group. He ensured that his leadership would extend even after his death by making it clear to his followers that African Americans would prevail, with or without him (Messick and Kramer, 2005).
Martin Luther King Jr. showcased the three main attributes of a transformational leader: articulation of an ideological vision; modeling the values implied by the vision through personal example, including risk-taking and self-sacrificing behaviors, and careful image building; and finally, empowering followers by expressing both high performance expectations and high confidence in the followers’ ability to meet those expectations (Messick and Kramer, 2005).
He lead both by word and by example, made followers believe that they are capable of great things. King’s leadership was innovative in the substance and style of his oratory (Skowronek and Glassman, 2007). Blending African American, Christian and democratic images and traditions, he forged an interracial rhetoric that inspired people of both races (Skowronek and Glassman, 2007). His great speeches mobilized many thousands of Blacks and whites for civil rights activism.
He was equally innovating in finding a new path for social change based on nonviolence and he sought racial reconciliation in the name of love. To a nation whose politics was dictated by self interests and violence, he articulated an alternative path of political transformation. He was innovative also in the tactics of political change (Skowronek and Glassman, 2007).
He rejected the proposition that change agents must work through official channels and stay within legal boundaries. He championed civil disobedience, creating crises and compelling local and national officials to confront racial conflicts. His leadership style was totally creative.
King can also be seen as leader shaped by his followers (Skowronek and Glassman, 2007). Students at Atlanta persuaded him to join their mass disobedience event and he was arrested along with them. He later directed similar events at Birmingham (1963) and Selma (1965). He was picked by senior leaders to lead the Montgomery bus boycott but he soon made it an event that symbolizes his commitment to non-violence (Skowronek and Glassman, 2007). The leader-follower relationship was a crucial factor in the leadership style of Martin Luther King Jr.
Malcolm X
As an African American leader, Malcolm X continued in the tradition of black leaders before him such as Du Bois, Garvey and Woodson and promoted the knowledge of African American history and culture. His heroic brand of leadership served as a voice from the frustrations and hopes of the African American people (Smallwood, 2001). Malcolm X had a leadership style quite different from that of Martin Luther King though he was also charismatic.
He helped define the ideal of Black leadership as supermasculinity (Brackette, 1996). He was tall, handsome, obviously intelligent and charming (Brackette, 1996). But beneath that charming exterior, he had a restless spirit, raw energy and the hunger of a hunter in waiting. Brackette F. Williams in his book “Women out of place” says that the electricity produced by these opposing poles of his personality were positively inductive. He was a master of words and highly knowledgeable so much so he could take on news reporters, experienced civil rights leaders, college professors and Oxford debaters with great aplomb.
Both friends and critics recognized his extraordinary communication skills (Brackette, 1996). Through brilliant and calculated use of the mass media, Malcolm X created an image of leadership that effectively challenged the authority of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When he was forced to leave the National of Islam, he admitted that he had done very little other than talk for the entire period he was with Elijah Muhummad’s separatist movement (Brackette, 1996). He confessed that the militant reputation of the Muslims did not have any substance. Thus, as a leader he was flexible and changed his views when he found them wrong, but wrong choices reflected poorly on his judging and decision-making capabilities.
Malcolm X was rebellious leader and criticized black church leaders for failing to see how self-esteem required separation. He railed at black Christians for building churches rather than businesses: “Then after you build the church you have to go and beg the white man for a job” (Cushman-Wood, 1993).
He said that to be employed under white people was a temporary solution for African Americans. He saw integration of the blacks with the whites as nothing but an attempt by “upper class” blacks to win approval from whites. This disdain for the middle-class African Americans ran throughout his messages, as is typified by his story of the “house negro” and the “field negro” (Cushman-Wood, 1993)). These negative feelings in Malcolm show that he was basically a pessimist.
Malcolm X started out on a life of crime and was imprisoned in his youth for robbery. While in prison, he adopted the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and became a passionate spokesman for the Nation of Islam which called for blacks to build a separate society free from the control of whites (Cushman-Wood, 1993). Malcolm’s leadership was based on revolutionary rhetoric, dynamic personality and unyielding commitment to defending the rights of African Americans and contrasted with Martin Luther King’s philosophy of passive resistance. He later got disillusioned by the Nation of Islam and gave up his separatist efforts (Rovira, 2007). This change can be seen as a major risk taken by Malcolm X and one that led to his assassination on February 21, 1965.
In one particular incident in 1957, when Malcolm X was still in the NOI, a member of the NOI was beaten by the police in Harlem and did not receive medical attention. Malcolm X took charge and marched thousands of members of the NOI in a disciplined fashion to the police precinct and demanded medical care. Once his demand was met, Malcolm dispersed the entire crowd with just a hand signal. The police commander was overheard saying to his subordinates, “no man should have that much power” (Rovira, 2007) Thus, we see that Malcolm X was a charismatic leader with great style and wielding a lot of power.
Malcolm X proved that street elements could rise to leadership in the struggle for Black Freedom. William W. Sales, comparing the leadership of Malcolm with that of King says: “As Dr. King represented the living example of W.E.B. du Bois’s “talented tenth”, so Malcolm X represented the manifest leadership potential of the newest stratus to join the Civil Rights struggle” (Sales, 1994). Sales further goes on say that Malcolm proved that life’s traumatic experiences at the hands of a racist system can be transformed to a source of insight and emancipation through study, knowledge, morality and self discipline (Sales, 1994).
Malcolm’s charisma was founded on his ardent desire to help other break the paradigm of ruling class thought. His closest friends remember his as a great teacher. His lack of formal education enabled him to see things plainly without interference from intellectual thinking. Thus Malcolm X was a leader who activated the intellect as well as the emotions. He called for honesty and taught people how to be self emancipated. His best quality as a leader was his open mindedness.
The Nation of Islam viewed woman as weak subjects who need to be watched and protected. Malcolm X initially held the same position. But later one he saw that the development of countries depended on the development of women and he had the acquaintance of strong Black women leaders such as Ella Baker, Ruby Dois Robinson and Fannie Lou Hamer. Hence he changed his position and called for women participation and leadership in all aspects of work.
Conclusion
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both charismatic leaders with a great following. They were excellent orators and had great communication skills. They could talk and inspire their followers. Their basic ideologies differed. However, they were similar in their leadership styles – both of them were charismatic and wielded a great deal of personal power. Martin Luther King Jr. was more of a transformational leader as he set a high moral standard for his followers, created a future vision for them that was in accordance with the Bible and the Constitution of America and inspired them even after his death. Malcolm X had his eyes fixed on the American Reality whereas for King, it was more about the American dream.
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