Where leadership comes from

I’m late in responding, but I love what Mitch Ratcliffe blogged on the topic, here:
“…we only recognize leaders in retrospect….Rosa Parks was a person who just got tired of the way thing were, the injustice she and her people experienced every day. And all she did was refuse to comply with the injustice and viola, she was a leader.”
There’s that, and there’s more. Reading the autobiography of Nelson Mandela… there were many people involved in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Mandela started as a lawyer and politican among many others in the movement.
What struck me about the book is the prodigious amount of care and thought Mandela took to think about the messages and tactics he was trying to communicate, and the effort to connect with the interests and cares of the different individuals and groups he was talking with. It makes for long and rather tedious sections of the book as Mandela creates and delivers and revises speeches, year after year. It’s like listening to Yo Yo Ma practicing five hours a day.
Following Mitch’s point, leaders emerge from a community, and they become leaders through the hard work of organizing and communicating with others.
Television seems to change the picture. Television seems to anoint a leader — someone with a firm gaze and a strong jaw who says simple things over an over again to arbitrary questions.
TV skills are important in a TV age, but we need people who have the first kind of leadership, sparked by a desire to change the situation, and honed by very deliberate hard work and practice.

2 thoughts on “Where leadership comes from”

  1. Rosa Parks was a leader in the civil rights movement before she initiated the civil disobedience that started the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. I remembered this from Parting the Waters, a bio of Martin Luther King, but Ben Greenberg pointed me to another, more detailed account in The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change by Aldon D. Morris. Morris notes that Mrs. Parks had refused to comply with the segregated seating on Montgomery buses several times in the 1940s. She had been the secretary of the local NAACP since 1943 and was the advisor to an NAACP youth group, whom she encouraged to borrow books from the “white” library and to ride the buses in the “white” seats–and then to discuss their actions as a group with her. Though she was the quiet, dignified woman of high morals that the movement needed as a symbol, she was also a leader in organizational life.
    Indeed, leaders emerge from a community. It’s true that it doesn’t make a very exciting biography to write about all the meetings and speeches and strategy, as you note about Mandela. But it is important that you don’t have to be a lawyer and professional politician to lead intentionally.

  2. Rosa Parks was a leader in the civil rights movement before she initiated the civil disobedience that started the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. I remembered this from Parting the Waters, a bio of Martin Luther King, but Ben Greenberg pointed me to another, more detailed account in The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change by Aldon D. Morris. Morris notes that Mrs. Parks had refused to comply with the segregated seating on Montgomery buses several times in the 1940s. She had been the secretary of the local NAACP since 1943 and was the advisor to an NAACP youth group, whom she encouraged to borrow books from the “white” library and to ride the buses in the “white” seats–and then to discuss their actions as a group with her. Though she was the quiet, dignified woman of high morals that the movement needed as a symbol, she was also a leader in organizational life.
    Indeed, leaders emerge from a community. It’s true that it doesn’t make a very exciting biography to write about all the meetings and speeches and strategy, as you note about Mandela. But it is important that you don’t have to be a lawyer and professional politician to lead intentionally.

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