What Martin Luther King can teach us about the unexpected, unplanned rise of leaders

At about 9:45 in the evening on Monday, January 30, 1956, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and recently elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, stood on his porch and addressed the crowd on his front lawn. Inside the one-story white clapboard house that served as the backdrop for King’s impromptu press conference were several policemen, reporters, and friends, as well as King’s shaken wife, Coretta, and their sleeping seven-week-old daughter, Yolanda. Immediately behind King were the four front windows shattered by a bomb — either a hand grenade or a half stick of dynamite — that had been thrown at his home thirty minutes earlier. Among other dignitaries sharing the makeshift dais with King were the mayor, W.A. Gayle, wearing his Alabama National Guard uniform, and Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers. 

On this particular evening, Mayor Gayle insisted, “I am going to work with my last breath if necessary to find and convict the guilty parties,” and Commissioner Sellers pointed out that “I do not agree with you in your beliefs, but I will do everything within my power to defend you against acts such as this.” Just two days before, the same mayor insisted he was done “pussyfooting around” with Montgomery’s bus boycotters, and Commissioner Sellers’s police had arrested King for driving 30 miles per hours in a 25-mph zone. In front of King, tightly packed in the thirty feet between the porch and street, stood 300 of Montgomery’s black citizens, men and women who’d been walking and carpooling to work since the bus boycott had begun. 

Two months earlier, on the afternoon of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was riding the bus home from work and famously refused to give up her seat to a white man when the bus driver ordered her to do so. She was promptly arrested for violating Montgomery’s segregation laws, and then agreed to fight the case when asked by E.D. Nixon, a local black leader.

A community swung into motion. 

Jo Ann Robinson, a member of the Women’s Political Council, gathered up friends and headed to a nearby college to use its mimeograph machine. Overnight, they printed thousands of leaflets calling for a bus boycott the following Monday. Robinson phoned Nixon at 3:00 a.m. to tell him about the idea, and he agreed with the approach. By 5:00 a.m. he was calling other leaders in Montgomery, informing them of the planned boycott and inviting them to a meeting that evening — Friday, December 2 — at King’s church. That meeting convened fifty local black leaders, mostly pastors, and approved plans for the Monday boycott. Through the weekend, they spread word about the boycott using press contacts, leaflets, and their Sunday pulpits.

The Monday boycott was a surprising success. Hardly any blacks rode the bus, and about 500 of them were in the courthouse when Parks was convicted and Nixon went to post her bond. Instead of taking the $14 fine, Parks’s lawyer appealed the verdict to the state’s court of appeals. The fight was on.

That afternoon, leaders met at Reverend L. Roy Bennett’s Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to plan for the evening’s mass meeting. At 3:00 p.m., eighteen of those present withdrew to Bennett’s study. Nixon, along with two local ministers, suggested creating a new organization, the “Montgomery Improvement Association,” or MIA for short, to oversee the continuance of the boycott and the bubbling enthusiasm of Montgomery’s black community. Next Bennett called for nominations to serve as president. Rufus Lewis—a prominent local businessman and a parishioner at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—unexpectedly nominated King. Lewis’s friend seconded King’s nomination, and no other candidates were put forth. Bennett asked King if he’d accept the job. To the surprise of some in the room, King accepted, replying, “Well, if you think I can render some service, I will.”

In the four days between Parks’s Thursday arrest and Monday’s pivotal decision to sustain the momentum of the boycott, King did far less than dozens of other leaders in Montgomery’s black community. But for reasons of circumstance, he was elected the MIA’s president, and those circumstances altered the course of his life.

Now his main task was to sustain the energy that had propelled the first four days of the burgeoning movement — an energy that had people accepting phone calls at 3:00 a.m., staying up all night to make photocopies, and forgoing the convenience of the bus — through an unforeseeable future and against a powerful foe.

So, two months after the bus boycott began, King found himself standing in the midst of the crime scene on his front porch — and in the middle of the varied interests personified by his family, the press, his followers, and Montgomery’s white leaders — and spoke. In his sharp double-breasted tan overcoat, tailored suit, pressed white shirt, and trim black tie, the handsome twenty-seven-year-old began by telling the crowd that it should not get “panicky” or “get your weapons because I want you to love your enemies.” After insisting that nothing get out of hand, he reminded everyone that “I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman … if I am stopped this movement will not stop… What we are doing is just. And God is with us.” With that, the crowd went home, and Montgomery’s blacks sustained their bus boycott for another 325 days. 

King hadn’t started the boycott, others had. But circumstances thrust him into the role of leader. The young pastor was entirely dependent upon the movement he was part of. And yet on that night, that movement was dependent on him for its direction. The role of leader, or “spokesman,” as he put it, required him to communicate multiple messages to stakeholders with opposing viewpoints in an impromptu speech on the same evening his home had been bombed while his infant daughter slept. 

The task was considerable. King had to calm a justifiably angry crowd while at the same time encouraging them to continue their bus boycott in the face of extralegal violence. He had to stand stone-faced, but peacefully, between two men who were trying to align the power of the state against him and the movement, while convincing them that he would not be intimidated by further threats of violence. And at some point, he probably had to tend to his frightened family. As the civil rights movement pulled him along as its leader, King would spend the last twelve years of his short life considering crises as fractious as this one and more.

Leaders emerge, unexpectedly, much more often than they plot a rise to the top. And once they emerge, they play particular roles more than they dictate events. 

By the end of 1956, as a unifier, organizational head, spokesperson, symbol, and chief negotiator, King had played a part in the bus boycott that gave the civil rights movement its best?known win. At a local level, he helped to sustain an environment in which Montgomery’s blacks prioritized their rights more highly than segregationists did the status quo. Up close, it was as much about 382 days of walking in the cold or taking a 3:00 a.m. phone call as it was about any particular speech. But stories, like movements, are most effective when all of their complication and struggle can be focused into the relatable image of a single figure. Rosa Parks precipitated the struggle, but as the story of Montgomery reached a national audience, King was at the front — or, more properly, in the middle.

Stanley McChrystal, Jeff Eggers, and Jason Mangone are the authors of Leaders: Myth and Reality, from which this article is adapted.