...Leadership Project: Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African American Civil Rights Movement. He was born on January 15, 1929 and is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Gandhi. By doing this and leading many followers to fight for what they believe in King has become a national icon in the history of modern American liberalism. We choose to do our project on Martin Luther King Jr. for many reasons. The main and obvious reason was because we admire how he took on such a large task basically by himself, allowing anyone else who wanted to help the cause join him. We also chose King because of the way he went about accomplishing his goals. King chose to accomplish his goal by only using means of non violence. King did this by organizing peaceful protests, marches, and of course his famous speeches. King has many of the characteristics and traits that all leaders must have. King portrayed the ability to lead through his courage, personality, problem solving, creativity, the ability to keep calm and many more. However Kings most notable characteristic or trait was his vision. A good leader must have a vision, and Kings vision helped open America's eyes to one of its biggest problems civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr has many great qualities; courage, personality, wisdom, and vision therefore...
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...headlined “Remarks on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr”. It is the speech of Robert F. Kennedy, a prominent democratic senator from New York, and it was delivered on the 4th of April in 1968. He spoke in Muncie in the afternoon. On the plane to Indianapolis, where he was to speak to the black community, he was told Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis. (Bart Peterson). This is an example of demographic level of influence because it is composed based on race, in this example black community. The opening sentences of the speech show that the author is going to present sad news –“ that the man who dedicated his life to struggling for the justice – Martin Luther King is killed. The author stresses that it will be difficult times filled with bitterness and violence, but also notices the reason of Martin Luther King’s death, that he died in the cause of effort to replace that violence from people’s life and to make this world better” Indianapolis, IN This two are clear example of a psychology level of influence. Also his opening sentence “I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world” Indianapolis, IN Further on the speaker calls the people to continue this efforts, don’t let them be wasted and find the strength to go beyond this times. Next, he points out that the United States don’t need division and hatred but love and wisdom, and this is the climax of his speech....
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...Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership Model Leadership of Dr. Martin Luther king Introduction Dr, Martin Luther King was basically a religious man who a through his exceptional qualities as a model of moral values, ethics, charisma, trust, energy and devotion to his beliefs. Made is place in the history of one of the most honored and followed leaders in our history. He was the man of courage, honor and vision which he always had held above his Own life and stood fast during extremely difficult and threatening times. He is a perfect specimen to be chosen by anyone who wants to see, learn and feel, what a true “wholehearted” leader looks like and to be followed blindly. It will be wrong to say that Dr. Luther’s life as leader should be assessed on the basis of personality, though, he had traits which are beyond simple explanation. The best way to explore his unquestionable strengths as a leader has to be seen through the lens of “the five practices of the exemplary leadership model”. The first being the, “Model the way”, which explains how a leadership interacts with other people with a set of undeviating principals, by setting examples through his/her standards of behavior. Dr, Martin Luther King was a great transformational leader, whose set of actions were very clear and well understood . He set the examples of being stead fast to his ground without changing his behavior to gain short term success. He remained glued to his objectives and long term goals...
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...influence the African American community. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X two men having experienced different things in their lives held different beliefs and morals and influenced people based upon those things. Martin Luther King Jr., came from a Baptist home with a fairly easy childhood, he was educated when he was younger and attended Morehouse College, an all black college, where he had several role models that shaped his beliefs. Malcolm X, on the other hand, experienced a hard childhood and used drugs and committed other crimes in his early adult years. While in prison he found a father figure in Elijah Muhammad and joined the Nation of Islam. There are many differences between Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X in the way they acted and influenced the African American community. This paper will look to describe their differing views and analyze their actions and their lives. In most cases a person’s childhood has a lasting affect on the rest of a person’s life. In comparing Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X this seems to be the case. Martin Luther King Jr., was born January 19, 1929 and was raised by a strong supportive family. He had a somewhat privileged life and “never experienced the feeling of not having the basic necessities of life.”[1] His father “was a community leader in Atlanta and pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church” and his mother “was a school teacher and an accomplished pianist.”[2] Although King was well off economically he was also...
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...mostly African American’s about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. as he landed in Indianapolis, Indiana on April 4th 1968, the same night the prominent leader, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed by a white man named James Earl Ray. Robert F. Kennedy was the first to inform the death of Dr. King to the crowd which gave him the opportunity to speak of the peace and the unity their leader followed hoping to settle the potential rioters and riots and tension that have been occurring throughout America as the devastating news spread. His message is compelling because he makes great use of connecting with his audience. O’Connor claims that Kennedy’s speech was immediately effective because there were no riots in Indianapolis compared to other Black cities in the nation and I feel like this is a valid point made. Although Kennedy’s speech was short, it was within an appropriate amount of time, given the fact that he didn’t have a lot of time to prepare the speech since he had also just recently heard the news about the death of Martin Luther King. He appeals to his audience with the use of...
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... Dr. King speaks of the struggle as a hope for the poor and oppressed, regardless of race or creed as Ho Chi Minh fought for the liberty of his people over the corrupt Dieu regime. Noting he had several major reasons for commenting on Vietnam, the most apparent and obvious of the irony that we “have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools” (King). King referred to a cruel manipulation of the poor, those youth with education or money were exempt from a war, sending poor youth and minorities into a country and fighting a war they did not understand, fighting for liberty of the people in Vietnam while killing side by side, yet they would not be able to eat in the same room or live on the same block in America. From the Japanese, French and later American involvement, the Vietnamese have been embroiled in 116 constant years of warfare and oppression, betrayed by the Japanese, betrayed by the French and anticipating and inevitable betrayal from the blatant lies of the U.S.A. King mentions this distrust of the Vietnamese against the United States and how “Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made” (King). King spoke on the viewpoint of the...
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...forever on November 4, 2008. Anyone watching a television on this important evening knew that everything had changed. Barak Hussein Obama had just been elected the 45th President of the United States of America, and he represented the first African American to ever win this office. To many the election was a fulfillment of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream for social and political equality for African Americans. Still others, including the newly elected President, reached back to Lincoln. President Obama would also, invoke the founding fathers, giving credit to the social experiment that democracy is and thus hinting to the efforts of Washington and others. The days that followed the Obama election would be filled with symbolism leading to the concert on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, and the day of service, called by the President, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the day before inauguration. The election of President Obama seemed to have brought full circle the experiment of democracy. The dreams of the founding fathers were present, the echo of Lincoln’s consequential Presidency were present, and certainly the dreams and speeches of Dr. King were front and center in this cultural moment. Yet the cultural moment represented so much more than a continuum of ideas and dreams of significant men. This moment was one of the first major societal changes in a generation. Perhaps not Ironically, the election of Barak Obama had ripple effects upon social change in the United...
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...In those Halcyon Sixties, specifically in April of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his remarkable Letter from Birmingham Jail. In it he explained to his fellow clergy critical of his sit-ins, marches, and direct action why he felt non-violent activism was necessary. He wrote from his cell that he has “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not . . . the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” He acknowledged that while they truly do agree with the goals he seeks, they choose to avoid the tension of activism. After the long day at the office or chauffeuring the kids around, we need to relax in front of the...
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...Madison arguing against the ancient assumption that a populace needed controlling from some higher force. Instead, as the Constitution allowed, America would trust in the wisdom of its people, deciding at large, through the nonviolent means of elections, who was most fit to lead and how. Still, nobody expected that an ignored and despised racial minority to be the ones who, two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution, would be the ones to face down hatred and push the United States back towards serving the will of the people. Yet that was exactly what the Civil Rights Movement was and it was achieved through nonviolence. Calling the ideals of the Founding Fathers “an unrealized dream” Martin Luther King, Jr. would say that the American people had “proudly professed the principles of democracy and… practiced the very antithesis…” (Branch, 2006). The Civil Rights Movement would be a long and deadly struggle, casting American race relations into international focus, and eventually fragmenting under internal pressures but it changed the country forever, resurrecting voting rights of the Fifteenth Amendment that had been enshrined after the Civil War and then buried, along with the rights of the black race, in the failure of Reconstruction. One of the seminal works on both the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement is Taylor Branch’s account, which unfolds as a fairly straightforward narrative filled with details of major and minor events in the unfolding...
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...Maya Angelou, born April 4th 1928, grew up with a lot of challenges she had to face in life. At a young age, her parents’ marriage was broken and she was forced to live with her grandmother. While living with her grandmother, she was faced with prejudice and racial discrimination. A few years later her father popped up in her life and sent her to live with her mother, where a couple of years went by and she was being abused by her mother’s boyfriend. Maya told her family and that man was put in jail for only one day. He was beaten to death a few days after being released from jail, which caused her to become mute for almost 5 years. I think that with everything Maya Angelou has been through, so far in her life, if she was not a strong enough person, she probably would have drowned herself in sorrow and punished herself for all that has happened in her life. Instead, she moved back to Stamps, where her grandmother lived, and began to meet with Ms. Bertha Flowers, who was a family friend and teacher. Ms. Flowers helped Maya with literature, art, and managed to help Maya find her voice again. When Maya hit thirteen years of age, she decided to reunite with her mother in San Francisco. She attended high school and worked very hard. She also received a scholarship to study dance and drama at the California Labor School. Maya had to drop out of high school to become San Francisco’s first female, African-American streetcar conductor. Finally, she returned to school, even though she...
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...Famous Thinkers Catalina Britton PHL458 May 12, 2014 Charles Crenshaw Famous Thinkers Bertrand Russell was a “British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, social critic and political activist (Roberts, 2013).” He also was a self proclaimed liberal, pacifist, and socialist. However, he did admit he had never been any of the previous, with any profound impact. During the 20 century, Russell was preeminent in the founding of analytic philosophy and is touted as a premier logician of his time. Russell exuded great influence over “logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics(Roberts, 2013).” Among all these accomplishments, Russell was also an anti war activist who spent time in prison for his pacifism during WWI and stood against Hitler in WWII as well as criticizing totalitarianism of the Stalinist movement. He was very out spoken about the US involvement in the Vietnam War and a fierce proponent of nuclear disarmament. Russell received the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1950’s for his significant contributions in the areas of “humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought (Roberts, 2013).” During his life time Russell was very politically active as evidenced by his 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto which addressed Nuclear disarmament and was signed by many of the prominent physicist and intellectuals...
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...to the same school as team. Not only were the blacks striving for freedom but they also strived for justice. Everyone didn’t have the honor to be an influence and make history but many other people did. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the historical individuals that left memories on this earth. After reviewing his and Former president Lyndon Johnson’s speeches, I have made many inferences that can not only do good to society today but as well as society from back in the day. In Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, on August 28th in Washington D.C. As if Martin was writing a paper, he started his announcement with an attention grabber saying, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” He expressed the feelings he had towards the African American race not being treated fairly. As a Civil rights activist he put in effort to not only gain equality but to change minds. He encouraged whites to consider giving blacks a chance to be just as important to society as they was. Every struggles blacks as a whole went through led to the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC. This group immediately elected King their president, and began looking for other civil rights battles to fight for success. He didn’t only lead but he spoke to the world about what is expected and needed to...
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...calling a white American, a European American? The answer is no. Why can’t we call the group labeled African Americans, Americans? When our group goes to a TCU football game, we cheer for the team as a whole. At TCU a black football player is called a football player. A white football player is also called a football player. If a sport as simple as football can get past discrimination of white and black, how come America cannot? People like Johnny Lee Clary, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela are great examples of attempts to over come black racism. Peter J. Paris makes many great points in his book Virtues and Values: the African and African American Experience. Paris uses leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. to empahsis that troughout the hard times, African virtues and values stood strong. The virtues and values Paris hit mostly on were: Beneficence, Forbearance, Practical Wisdom, Improvisation, Forgiveness, Justice, and Public and Private Ethics. Paris uses many examples to show how King and Mandela practiced and believed in all seven of these virtues and values. By having role models of this stature follow these virtues and values, it made it easier to keep the sacred...
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...was given by Martin Luther King Jr.During the mid-20th Century, racism was a huge issue in the United States, which the most prominent was the racism of African-Americans. Although all blacks were supposed to be free, under a corrupt law system, blacks were victimized mercilessly. Therefore, blacks decided to try and change the system and multiple civil rights activists and groups appeared. Throughout the 1960s, King engaged in various civil rights boycotts and protests, helping to further the movement and gaining its eventual victory.Out of all of his civil rights-related efforts, he gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in our nation’s capital, Washington D.C. The speech was given in front of the Lincoln Memorial and is known by many as one of the most influential speeches on freedom and the equality of Americans, regardless of their race. 200,000 people gathered to hear Dr. King talk about the segregation and discrimination against African Americans in our nation at that time. In his speech He used pathos such as using the bible to get emotional reactions, with logos he gave real life situations as examples, and ethos he used what people thought and knew about Abraham Lincoln. This were just a few examples of what he said in his speech. King bought to the attention of the American people that our country was founded upon freedom and as a democracy we have the right to change laws and institute new laws if it will benefit society as a whole. Dr. King use of pathos...
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...Jasmine Wingard Professor: Singleton Course: English 106 – 25 17 February 2015 African Americans and the word Nigger African Americans are God’s greatest creation. God said himself that he gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers. According to the short film “War for your Soul” this nation needed the strength, wisdom and abilities of African Americans to build the America we have today. The most powerful nation in the world. See what people fail to realize is that America was built on the backs of African Americans. Most of America is founded and created by African Americans but, it was taken away from them by the white people. Now white people are considered to be the founders and rulers of this land when truly the African Americans were the first Queens and Kings. The whites stripped African Americans from everything they built and owned. The Master of Darkness from “War on your Soul” claims he even tore their families apart by separating their children and selling them to different slave owners. Changed the name of African Americans to degrade and used racial slurs like calling them the word “Nigger.” A nigger is below everyone on the face of the planet close to being a dog says Master of Darkness from “War on your soul.” These tactics were used to break the spirits of African American slaves so they would feel belittled and worthless. African Americans could always count on the mercy of God. To withstand the pressures of time. God carried them through...
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