Martin Luther King – Time, Power and Agency
Martin Luther King was a Nobel Laureate, Baptist minister, and African American civil rights activist. He is one of the most significant leaders in U.S. history and in the modern history of nonviolence. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a major contribution to leadership literature. It can be evaluated from a multiple dimensions. In this case the letter will be explored from the perspectives of time, power, agency and praxis.
Time
Martin Luther King played the value of time against his detractors. They suggested that his activities were "unwise and untimely." King’s response was likewise focused, “seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas.” He goes on suggesting that if he responded to all criticisms, his “secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence” and he “would have no time for constructive work.” He uses the word patience as a way of dealing with the urgency of his mission and then asserts his teleology, “I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of the future. I have no fear about the outcome…”
When asked, "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" King invoked the power of time stating, “We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.” He equates the word "Wait" with the word “Never." Stating that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." He is demanding transformation now. There is no time to wait. Such is his overpowering argument against the placating statements from the Clergymen.
He further emphasizes the unique status in time for the Clergymen. “Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time.” Extending upon this framework, he states “when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait…I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” King expresses hope “that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom.” King conveys communications from white brethren quoting a letter, "…you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has..." King describes this communication as rooted in “a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.” King uses the concept of time to fame expectations, relationships and to construct appropriate perceptions of power. King defines time as neutral, a force that can be used either destructively or constructively and ultimately frames it to honor both himself and the Clergymen.
Power
Martin Luther King’s legitimate power was the least expression of his role as leader of the civil rights movement having been selected by community leaders to head the Montgomery bus boycott (French & Raven, 1959). He describes his invitation to Birmingham from a collective strength from the eighty five affiliated organizations, so that it is no longer him as an individual that they are criticizing. He then moves from many religious mentions to a tie from religious commitment to justice. Martin Luther King was brilliant in his power to state the obvious, “Injustice anywhere is threat to injustice everywhere.” In the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he is exercising this legitimate power through his role as a minister.
But beyond the framework of French and Raven in terms of power, King connected to transcendental and moral power of a great spiritual teacher. King called meetings and influenced national policy. While he did not hold an office in the sense of French and Raven’s legitimate power, he had the capacity through referent and expert power to influence the political process in America. His expertise as a writer and sociopolitical thinker placed him into a leadership role. The extraordinary place that King maintains in history gives him continuing referent power.
I place King at Hagberg’s 5th level, ‘power by purpose.’ This is the power that transcends ego, intellect, and will. There are difficult hurdles that Hagberg collectively labels ‘the wall’ where a larger cause occurs by empowering others (2002). People at this stage of power often do not hold office, but influence the collective. While he did not hold a political office nor did he sustain political activities in the academic use of the word in professional political circles, he influenced the nation heavily. His work affected the development of policies and procedures at the national level.
King had the power of conviction. His message contained the power of the moment. He didn’t stand up in Washington and say I sort of have a dream. He was completely congruent in the moment. He had the power of presence; this is a form of charismatic influence. He had remarkable expertise King’s intellect was powerful. The miracle of King was his influence. People changed and people engaged. He was brilliant in his reframing of righteous racism into moral authority meanwhile sustaining a high spirit identifying the Clergy as “men of genuine good will.” He powerfully casts the specter of expectation “our hopes bad been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us.” He quotes T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."
Agency
King is a transformative leader in that he engaged change regarding the sense of agent and agency not just for Afro-Americans but all Americans. Agency is any social structure where one party (agent) acts for or represents another (principal) under the authority of the later. He reacts to the notion of being an "outsider coming in" by shifting the agency from the local government and religious leaders to a higher power. His righteous position is affirmed, “thus saith the Lord" an furthered by likening his efforts to that of Apostle Paul’s response to the Macedonian call for aid.
King placed moral agency above human laws, “One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” He brings the moral imperative with regards to human laws home with the statement, “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal.” Further, he ties law to religion in “A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or law of god. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” He asks the question, “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust?” He defines an unjust law as “a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself… a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.” Further, “a law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.” He quotes St. Thomas Aquinas describing unjust law as a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. King further refines the definition law. Just law is any law that uplifts human personality while unjust laws degrade the human personality. Thus, segregation statutes are unjust in that they distort the soul and damage the personality.
Praxis
Praxis is complex activity where individuals create culture and society. In postmodern Marxian influenced literature, praxis results in the becoming of critically conscious human beings. Martin Luther King engaged praxis through direct action. Through a cycle of action-reflection-action Martin Luther King achieved liberation of Afro-Americans in the South. Characteristics of praxis that Martin Luther King emphasized included self-determination as opposed to coercion, intentionality as opposed to reaction, creativity as opposed to homogeneity, and rationality as opposed to chance. "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" King maintains that this is the very purpose of direct action. King extrapolates four basic steps of nonviolent campaigns, likely from his mentor Gandhi.
King evoked a sense of interconnected communities and states as destiny, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” This transformation of the group awareness also reorganizes the sense of agents and agency. To achieve this, King followed his four fold plan of nonviolence, “we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer…The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” This would break the culture of silence, a characteristic which Freire attributes to oppressed people in colonized countries, with significant parallels in highly developed countries (2000). This model fits for King in the south during the 1960s racial upheavals and it is resonant now. In the culture of silence which the Statement by Alabama Clergymen promoted, alienated and oppressed people are not heard by the dominant members of their society. The dominant members prescribe the words to be spoken by the oppressed through control of institutions, thereby effectively silencing the people. In Freire’s model, the Clergymen actions would cause oppression and the Afro-American people would internalize negative images of themselves (images created and imposed by the oppressor) further feeling incapable of self-governance. Thus, the imperative to wait would encourage the ‘culture of silence,’ resulting in impossible conditions for dialogue and self-government with “twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.”
In closing, King states “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.” Thus he reasserts his relationship to divine agency and frames his relations with the Clergy in a humble fashion. And lastly giving hope, he states that the “radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation”
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans. 30th Anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum.
French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Hagberg, J. O. (2002). Real power: Stages of personal power in organizations (Third ed.): Sheffield Publishing Company.