“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

—MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

Many people believe that because we focused on breaking unjust laws and evil traditions, that our movement was free-form, spontaneous, and unrehearsed. Nothing could be further from the truth. We did not just wake up one day and decide to march on Washington or from Selma to Montgomery. We studied, we strategized, we organized, trained, and prepared to take action. Most of what we accomplished grew out of years, decades, and even centuries of groundwork that was laid before most of us were even born, and those at the center of the struggle studied that history and used its wisdom to develop the strategic actions of the movement. From the legacy left by past generations, we gained a significant understanding of how we should forge ahead.

It is only through examining history that you become aware of where you stand within the continuum of change. You may find you are the “voice crying in the wilderness” who will have to walk alone. Or you may find only a few devotees who will join you throughout the whole period of your activism. This does not mean your work is not important. It means the part you must play is simply different than those leaders who stand at the front lines of a mass movement. Every contribution is important to the work of change, and it is only when you study the history of activism that you can perceive what your role may be and how others managed in the same kind of position years and decades before. It is through study and preparation that you can increase the power of your work.

I meet so many ambitious young politicians and leaders who want to jump to the head of the line. They do not know how we arrived at this point in our history as a nation, but they believe they should be appointed to lead us into the future. They think that because they are educated, articulate, and talented someone should usher them down the red carpet to a throne of leadership. But real leaders are not appointed. They emerge out of the masses of the people and rise to the forefront through the circumstances of their lives. Either their inner journey or their human experience prepares them to take that role. They do not nominate themselves. They are called into service by a spirit moving through a people that points to them as the embodiment of the cause they serve.

Growing up, my family and community were loving and accepting, but the world around us was full of so much hate. There was no NAACP chapter in my community—the organization had been banned in Alabama—so there was no activist community I could engage with to validate my deep sense of frustration and agitation. Most of the people around me, including my parents, did not believe it was constructive to complain about the unfairness of our way of life. They knew it was not right, but they could not see a way to change it. I could not figure a way out either, especially as a child, but in the center of my being I never stopped looking for one.

I was lucky to be born at a peak of activism, just as the wave of change was about to crest in the United States, when gifted leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Jim Lawson, and A. Philip Randolph were all alive and engaged in the same movement. Many of us in the movement were young and impatient, but we studied and prepared ourselves to confront the challenges of our time, and we respected the elder activists whose work charted the path to our future. Some of this was conscious preparation and other aspects seemed to involve a kind of divine orchestration that ordered our steps and brought people together from unlikely places to play a role in history. It is important for upcoming activists to study American history, as well as political and philosophical thought. It is unlikely that what you hope to accomplish is new. Current activism is almost always linked to the history of revolution worldwide, and Americans have a special connection to this legacy because our nation was born out of the struggle against tyranny.

So if we study the story of the Civil Rights Movement, we see that it was not by accident that someone like Martin Luther King Jr. became a great minister at the head of a movement. His is the quintessential example of leadership in the twentieth century, in my estimation, so it is important to study how he came to lead. He was born with a gift and placed within a set of circumstances that shaped and polished his talent. But King did not solely rely on what was bestowed on him. He made a conscious effort to build his merit through academic pursuits. He dressed well. He was articulate and well spoken, but that was not his focus. Those attributes were incidental to his emergence at the forefront of history. His primary concern was always on the substance of injustice. The people of Montgomery, the place where he began his career as the pastor, needed more than polish and shine. They needed someone with a deep understanding of the problems that met them at every turn. It was King’s commitment to search for answers to the problems of his people that made him fit for leadership, and it was his heritage that prepared him for it.

King was born into the bosom of leadership within a family of prominent ministers, and he lived in the city that would become the headquarters for the struggle for civil rights. When he became co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1960, King was carrying on a legacy, becoming the third generation to helm the church, preceded by his father and maternal grandfather.

As Martin Luther King Jr. evaluated the ministers he knew, he noticed that many lacked sophistication and a depth of religious training and academic knowledge, so he determined to enter the field with the best training he could attain. He wanted to distinguish himself and take ministry to a more professional level, not simply become a part of the crowd. He was also an intelligent and curious child who faced the cruel disappointments of racism with an inquiring mind. Most people who are raised under the oppression of social discrimination can recall the exact moment when they realized others saw them as different. King’s realization was not unusual. It happened to him as it did for many children: when he turned school-age. As a toddler he was fast friends with a little white boy, who played near his father’s store in King’s neighborhood. But once the boys became school-age, they were sent to separate schools, and King noticed the boy suddenly stopped coming to play. King was heartbroken. He simply could not understand why his friend didn’t visit him anymore. When he asked his parents about his disappointment, they revealed to him the system of discrimination and segregation that surrounded him. Years later, as a young high school student, the irony of winning an oratorical contest wasn’t lost on King either. Although his award-winning speech was about the paradox of discrimination in a nation where freedom was protected by law and revered in the words of its founding Constitution, on the bus trip back from the contest he and his teacher were made to get up from their seats and stand for fifty miles after some white passengers boarded the bus.

King was aggravated by these problems, but not daunted. The intellectual environment surrounding him and the numerous discussions he had overheard and engaged in with his parents and their friends who were scholars, ministers, and businessmen in the Atlanta community gave him a context to wrestle with these issues mentally. He was determined to understand how a religion that commanded him to love could resolve the problems of a people surrounded by hate. He held this question in his mind throughout his entire academic experience and saw his scholarship as an opportunity to search for an answer.

He graduated from Morehouse at nineteen, and by the time he was twenty-three years old he held a doctorate in divinity from Boston College and a degree in divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary. He never forgot his purpose or his people in his work, and he used the mandates of graduate research to begin developing his own brand of social gospel. In his quest, he made it a point to study the work of all the major theologians and philosophers who might have had any bearing on his thesis. He also branched out beyond his comfort zone, as any credible scholar would, to study influential ideas of the time that were antithetical to his beliefs, like the work of Marx, Lenin, and Nietzsche. He examined every possible angle to find the theological answers to the questions he was asking, and he emerged in his study as a notable student and a compelling scholar.

One day he heard that Mordecai Johnson, the esteemed president of Howard University and also a minister, Morehouse graduate, and a gifted public speaker, was lecturing in Philadelphia. King decided to travel from Boston to hear Johnson speak. It was there that he heard the name Mohandas Gandhi for the first time. King was electrified by Johnson’s discussion of the nonviolent revolution in India, and when he returned from the outing he read everything he could find on Gandhi. His testament and philosophy were the critical missing links that helped King formulate an American strategy for overcoming segregation. Once he discovered these ideas he could have taught them in the protection of an ivory tower of a university. He certainly had enough offers to stay in the North and inspire the intellectual achievements of his students. But given the choice, he decided to return to the South to avail himself of the opportunity to participate in the struggle and put these notions to the test. He was aware that he was choosing between security and the likelihood that struggle would mean trouble, but he felt the imperative to practice what he would preach. So when the people of Montgomery called him to the forefront to serve as the leader of the boycott, he had done his share of studying, had reflected on an American approach to protest steeped in a deep legacy and theology that crossed the boundaries of nations and faiths, even at the young age of twenty-six.

 

It took twenty-three years for King to prepare himself to be the kind of outstanding minister that others have spent a lifetime trying to emulate. His command in the profession was rooted in more than just training; there was also a deep respect for the legacy that preceded him. He did not discard that heritage as the wisdom of another age, but he drew upon that history of his faith and the proven philosophies of protest to build his understanding. Yet his respect for the past did not offer King satisfaction with the status quo. He added to his profession by reaching for new experiences, taking advantage of educational opportunities outside the comfort zone of what he knew and had witnessed in Atlanta. In King we see the virtue of patience at work. He took his time and did his research as he evolved into the man he wanted to become. He also had faith in the hand of the divine to use him and all he had garnered at the appropriate time and place. He never clamored to be rich, famous, the best dressed, or the most articulate. But he had a vision of how he wanted to serve and he moved toward that vision. He studied, prepared, and readied himself so that he was the most able servant available.

 

The story of King’s road to leadership reflects the power of study to prepare the mind to command a people and leave a lasting legacy. The refinements of his academic preparation tend to overshadow the role that the spirit played in his ascent to becoming a civil rights icon, even though there is no question that King could never have become the symbol of a nonviolent revolution without a calling from the spirit. That is what gave him the power to minister to a people and a nation.

 

Some people are tracked down by what I call the spirit of history, to play a role in the evolution of humankind. My experience stands as a striking contrast to King’s very steady, visible path to leadership. In my case, it’s hard to draw a straight line that defines exactly how I came to lead. My story shows how the spirit can order a person’s steps. It can pluck him or her from the most unlikely place to stand on the front lines of change.

As a child, I grew up around people others may have viewed as poor or impoverished, but these people were actually rich: rich in character and rich in faith. They may have been denied the most basic material resources, but they did not lack the drive. No matter what life affords you in material goods you can rise above any circumstances through your adherence to high standards and a commitment to following the lead of your own spirit. Having values and holding on to our beliefs is what got us through and it’s what will get you through. I never felt I was the underdog. I never felt that I was poor or deprived. I discovered after I left my parents’ farm that other people viewed me as country or poor, but it was never how I saw myself. And it was never due to any self-defeating notion my parents or my community passed on to me. My upbringing, my community, my faith gave me confidence because it was not based on an external definition of our value. We knew we were children of the divine, so we believed in our own worth, regardless what the world might say.

I went to school, but unlike King I could only go sporadically because there were times the fields had to be planted or harvested. The only money the local government contributed to the schooling of black children in Alabama was the teacher’s salary. A financially strapped black community had to pay for everything else. We used old, hand-me-down textbooks the whites no longer needed, and just one teacher was responsible for educating students in several different grades.

When I was fifteen years old, the bus boycott was unfolding in Montgomery forty miles away from my home. Our family could not afford a newspaper subscription, but my grandfather had one, so I would read his paper, hungry for information. I was anxious to learn about any action taken to defend our dignity. And then one day, on an old radio, I heard the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. I could tell he was a young man from the South, just like me. He was preaching about the responsibility of Christians to respond to the injustices of segregation. He was delivering the message I had prayed to hear. He was answering the gnawing questions in my soul struggling to find a way out. King had found a way, and it was consistent with my dream to see the power of love manifest more than anything, to see hate eradicated and wrong made right.

When I heard King it was as though a light turned on in my heart. When I heard his voice, I felt he was talking directly to me. From that moment on, I decided I wanted to be just like him. Immediately, I wrote to New York to join a chapter of the NAACP, since Alabama did not have one, and to this day I am a member of the New York chapter. One day my mother brought home a brochure describing American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville (ABT). I wanted to go to King’s alma mater, Morehouse, but my grades weren’t good enough, and we couldn’t afford it. ABT, however, offered an undergraduate program for aspiring ministers that allowed students to work their way through college. I knew immediately that it was the place for me. Little did I know being in Nashville would position me at the heart of nonviolent activism, or that I would have the opportunity to work alongside the man I deeply admired. I couldn’t anticipate what the future would hold. At that time I was just following my heart, my desire to do something, and somehow, someway, the Creator ordered my steps and placed me right where I needed to be to play a role in the work for change.

When I arrived in Nashville, people thought I was backward, country, and shy. My resources were few, but my ability to commune with the spirit and allow myself to be guided by it propelled me to the center of change. I did not have the kind of material and intellectual resources that King had. Instead, mine was a kind of inner preparation, a silent communion with a higher power that is still a part of my daily life today. My adherence to the inner voice allowed me to participate in a movement for good. I say this to let you know that preparation can take many different forms. Not everyone is left a family legacy as rich as Martin Luther King Jr.’s, or has the same gifts and privileges, but there is a power that can raise you up even from the lowliest of places and guide you to the forefront of change if you truly want to create a better world.

“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing.

You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

—MOHANDAS GANDHI

 

What we accomplished back then is directly connected to many of the advances we see today. The activists of today have no need to “reinvent the wheel.” There is a lineage of struggle in America and around the world that can be used as a source of inspiration and instruction by anyone who is seriously interested in confronting the highest levels of power to make change. In my travels to England, India, Germany, South Africa, as well as through reports from Ireland, Japan, and Russia, I have met people involved in their own indigenous struggles who say they study the books and films documenting the Civil Rights Movement intensely, to glean strategy and principles of activism to use in their own societies.

It is no accident that the young people of Egypt could be heard chanting words we began using in protests on the streets in America forty years prior. When I heard the citizens in Tahrir Square shouting, “The people united will never be defeated,” it made me feel so good to see the seeds we planted decades ago were blossoming in another form. I was proud that the people of Egypt held to nonviolent principles, regardless of the brutality they faced. Later I read that Dalia Ziada, the Egypt director of the American Islamic Congress (AIC), was responsible for resurrecting a comic book we used extensively in the movement. On the cover was a drawing of Martin Luther King Jr., a Montgomery bus, and the dome of the Alabama state capitol. The AIC did their own research, found the comic book, and had it translated into Arabic to help spread the message and means of nonviolent protest throughout the masses of citizens gathered in Tahrir Square. They distributed two thousand copies of the comic book across Egypt. Fifty years ago, the Fellowship of Reconciliation distributed two hundred and fifty thousand throughout America. I invited Ziada to come to my office, and she gave me a copy of that comic book. She also told me that Egyptian students had received nonviolence training based on the training we received from Jim Lawson and others in the movement, except theirs was managed by Serbian dissidents who had used those tactics to create change in their own society. An international network of student activists had developed worldwide and they were training, teaching, and preparing one another in a way that ultimately became the Arab Spring. And then those seeds were regerminated in America, so that the actions of the people in the Middle East gave the people of Wisconsin courage to occupy the statehouse, and they, in turn, gave courage to those who decided to begin the Occupy movement in the United States. And now we see waves of change shifting and moving across international boundaries, based on a common understanding of how peaceful protest can create change. Study and preparation created this movement.

Each uprising of the people informs and seeds the others, especially in the age of the Internet. In Tunisia, word of an act of righteous indignation—a vendor who set himself on fire to protest the unjust confiscation of his property—spread like wildfire over Facebook and ultimately ended the regime of a tyrant.

During the Civil Rights Movement, we didn’t have the Internet. We did not have iPhones or computers. We didn’t even have fax machines. We had no power of celebrity, no money. But we had ourselves. So we used what we had. We put our bodies on the line for simple justice and social change. We did all we could, and by the power of grace, it was enough to create transformation. Our poise was not founded on money, breeding, or education, but rather on our spiritual lineage and unbreakable connection to the divine. What we could not muster was added through a grace that never failed, a stream of consciousness that was never interrupted by external circumstance. The spirit adds what we cannot offer to an end result that is more in keeping with the dictates of the universe. Any activist must have faith in this spiritual legacy, that in the work of change, we are not alone, but there are forces that assist us and act in concert with us. I will never forget our march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, before we met the sea of blue Alabama state troopers on the other side. We walked two by two, totally in faith, not knowing what our end would be. We were silent. Just six hundred of us walking in a quiet persistence. To me, it felt like a holy march, so solemn, so reverent, so filled with unity and purpose. Though in the pictures we look so alone, I felt like there was a band of brothers and sisters, the seen and the unseen who marched with us. Our spirits joined with others through the ages who had determined to stand for justice, and they were also there.

Had it not been for the struggles and sacrifices of the 1950s and ’60s, Barack Obama would never have been elected president of the United States. In turn, were we not inspired by the advancements of Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa and India, the organizing tactics developed by the Labor Movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as a commitment to nonviolence sealed in Europe during the first days of World War I, the American history we participated in creating would have been entirely different, and maybe much less influential. Every generation leaves behind a legacy. What that legacy will be is determined by the people of that generation. What legacy do you want to leave behind?

Your generation will have new leaders and will use different methods of struggle, but the purpose will be the same. You will be marching toward the next visionary horizon with the radiance of faith and truth, preparing the way for peace and reconciliation, building a highway that channels the almighty power of love as a guiding force in all the affairs of humankind, and your soul will join with those souls who have struggled for freedom, from the dawn of humanity.

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

—ROBERT F. KENNEDY