Martin Luther King Jr's Leadership Style

It is impossible to separate the leadership qualities of Dr. King, which defined his career, from his personal biography and from the history of race relations in the United States, not least because the leadership style that King was to adopt was dramatically different from what might have been expected of him. At the birth of Michael Luther King, Jr. in 1929, Michael Luther King, Sr. was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia and also a member of what has been aptly called "black bourgeois Atlanta" (Lewis, 1970, p. 8). That condition meant that even though Ebenezer Baptist served a less wealthy demographic segment than, say, the Negro Episcopalian or Congregational churches, young King was "insulated against the most brutal aspects of Southern bigotry" (Lewis, 1970, p. 11). King was a product and example of a privileged class. In 1935, King, Sr. changed his first name and that of his son to Martin, presumably to achieve a properly evangelical ring. "Daddy

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, 1963). First published in April 1963, the Letter presaged a certain momentum for the civil rights movement that was abetted by King's rhetoric. What was to become known as the March on Washington, a massive nonviolent demonstration for civil rights that gathered some 200,000 people between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, took place in August 1963, with King the featured speaker. The rhetoric of that speech and of King's oratory more generally fused the concept of integration and peace as American national ideal with the diction of the Protestant Christian evangelical witness. When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last" (Lane & Gregory, 1977, p. 49). King's oratory articulated a moral vision for America and positioned him as an advocate of civil rights and social justice. Although he maintained his pastoral role, relocating in the 1960s to Atlanta and Ebeneze
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