LEADERSHIP IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Leadership in Social Movement

Leadership in Social Movement

Introduction

Martin Luther King, Jr., began his public career as the reluctant leader who was drafted, without any foreknowledge on his part, by his Montgomery colleagues to serve as president of the freshly created Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). Montgomery's black civic activists had set up the MIA to pursue the boycott of the city's segregated buses called by the Women's Political Council (WPC) immediately after the December 1, 1955, arrest of Rosa Parks?

King was only twenty-six years vintage and had dwelled in Montgomery barely fifteen months when he accepted that post on Monday afternoon December 5. Two years later King explained that "I was surprised to be voted into agency both from the standpoint of my age, but more from the fact that I was the newcomer to Montgomery." On December 5, although, King was as much anxious as surprised, for his new post meant that he would have to consign the major address at that evening's community rally, which had been called to conclude if the fabulously successful one-day boycott would be expanded to apply extending pressure on bus company and town officials to change the bus seating practices. King later explained that he had discovered himself "possessed by fear" and "obsessed by the feeling of inadequacy" as he pondered his new challenge, but he turned to prayer and consigned the superb oration at the jam-packed gathering that unanimously resolved to extend the pr0test.

 

Discussion

Our formulation of ideology narrows its traditional meanings while evolving the comprehensive cultural notion for social-movement mobilization. Our formulation is also distinct from the broader notions of heritage and hegemony. It suggests that action adherents' ideologies are experientially designed versions of the past, present, and future social alignment and that these ideologies organize adherents' cognitive, moral, and emotional practices ~see Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001!. This conceptualization integrates structural and cultural factors, describing how they blend to establish and differentiate ideological perspectives. Ideology is often inflated by theorizing that equates it with the entire symbolic world. It is also often deflated by decreasing it to the pejorative charge hurled against those who speak for target truth.3 While ideology is not empirically unaligned of heritage, without its conceptual autonomy from other symbolic concepts its analytic usefulness is hindered.(Williams, 1996)

 Initially King and his MIA colleagues mistakenly presumed that the boycott would be relatively short, that white officials would be eager to negotiate the fast solution to the dispute. Indeed, the MIA's three modest demands asked not for the abolition of segregated seating, but only for the elimination of two worrying practices that the WPC had been protesting for several years: black riders not ever could sit in the 10 front "white only" seats on each bus, no matter how congested with black riders the bus might be, and black riders seated to the rear of the reserved section had to surrender their seats to any freshly boarding white riders for who front seats were not ...