What Martin Luther King’s message and methods can teach us today

Despite living on this Earth less than 40 years, Martin Luther King Jr. became a man for all times. He did this through constant evolution and improvisation. 

Over the years, King expanded his focus from issues primarily affecting Black people to the more encompassing problem of poverty. The 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, zeroed in on desegregation. Then, two years after the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which King led, his emphasis expanded to voting rights in Atlanta. A decade later, when he arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, to stand with sanitation workers, King had crafted an ideology complete with both anti-racist and anti-capitalist tenets. That broadening of his focus was a hallmark of his success because it made his efforts relevant beyond the Black community.

But King was adaptable not only in message but in methodology. Both points hold important lessons for those fighting for social justice today. He organized and mobilized in the spirit of community – addressing the needs of everyday people – and he came to understand when it is best to allow the people to speak for themselves.

Pushed to share the spotlight

This was not easy for King. He was not only molded by the parochial, church-based leadership model, but also magnified by it. The Montgomery bus boycott, and the organization that spearheaded it, the Montgomery Improvement Association, was made up of pastors and well-to-do Black folk, as described in King’s “Stride Toward Freedom.” That model created familiar and singular leaders such as King, who was the face of the movement until his assassination. 

King’s inclination was to continue in that vein and have others operate on the sidelines – a mindset that was challenged by women such as Ella Baker and Septima Clark, both of whom were considered “mothers of the movement.” 

Ultimately, King was persuaded to incorporate women and students into the struggle – and even to acknowledge their leadership roles – largely because of the influence of Baker, who advocated for moving “toward group-centered leadership, rather than toward a leader-centered group pattern of organization.” 

As Baker explained,“The fact that many schools and communities, especially in the South, have not provided adequate experience for young Negroes to assume initiative and think and act independently accentuated the need for guarding the student movement against well-meaning, but nevertheless unhealthy, over-protectiveness. 

“Here is an opportunity for adult and youth to work together and provide genuine leadership – the development of the individual to his highest potential for the benefit of the group.”

King would have preferred to keep students operating as a wing of his SCLC, but instead, under Baker’s guidance, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was formed in 1960. King’s willingness to adapt by acknowledging young people’s independent leadership within the movement galvanized later efforts. Student sit-ins and marches were chief methods for the 1963 campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, which proved to be one of the most difficult. 

One of the key civil rights actions in Birmingham that year was the Children’s Crusade in May, inspired by James Bevel, an SCLC leader who suggested that teenagers and school-age children join nonviolent protests. King and others were skeptical at first, but eventually the campaign took place, organized by the SCLC and Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

The sacrifices of the youth, who were attacked and jailed during the course of the campaign, cannot be understated. Images of police brutality and violence from onlookers spread across the country and eventually inspired action from then-President John F. Kennedy. The horrific series of events in Birmingham – including the bombing in September 1963 of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four young, Black girls – led to the Civil Rights Act becoming law the following year.

Needed: “A worldwide brotherhood”

Though sometimes pyrrhic, the victories in Birmingham shaped King. He came to eschew the “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and poverty because of the way each degraded people. His empathy sharpened his policy, and when he arrived in Memphis to stand with striking sanitation workers in 1968, he petitioned for their worth from both a labor-based perspective and simply as individuals.

That working-class message resonated regardless of age, race, or gender. King recognized the importance of meeting people where they were. His protests were practical: the right to sit anywhere on a bus, to eat at a lunch counter, to have decent working conditions and a living wage.  

The practicality of his message and its ultimate expansion beyond the Black community offer useful lessons for today’s social justice movements. Could Fair Fight, the voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams, address poverty and unemployment as well? As important as free and fair elections are, they are likely not top of mind to those struggling to pay rent or buy food. Instead of recruiting volunteers, could Fair Fight train unemployed peopled to do outreach and organizing, and in that way meet the people’s practical needs while also still focusing on election access and integrity? 

And what about Black Lives Matter? Known best for mobilizing much-needed protests against police violence, it could also identify day-to-day needs among the Black community and work to address them just as King tied his efforts to practical needs. 

Perhaps such versatility requires partnerships with various groups, another hallmark of King’s organizing model. While many of the key players from the Montgomery Improvement Association eventually founded the SCLC, the NAACP and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee operated outside King’s scope. Further, he received advice from the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, during the bus boycott, a partnership that lasted into the mid-1960s. While these partnerships, and the one in Birmingham with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, didn’t always go smoothly, they were generally fruitful. 

An excerpt from King’s final book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,” is a stark reminder of how we were robbed of a 40-year-old King, a 50-year-old King, or an even older King, yet he gave us lessons for a lifetime. The key adaptation we must all make is to learn how to live peaceably among each other.

“The large house in which we live demands that we transform this worldwide neighborhood into a worldwide brotherhood,” he wrote. “Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”