Martin Luther King, leadership, transformation, change.
The research finds that Dr. King personified the four characteristics of transformational leadership. It also illustrates King’s leadership legacy through modern works on leadership.
Few individuals have made such a significant contribution to the advancement of modern society as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Born into a family of Baptist ministers in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, Martin Luther King also became a Baptist minister and rose to national prominence through the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and as leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the mid- 1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964, his leadership was fundamental to that movement's success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the southern states, and other parts, of the United States.
Inspired by Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence, King promoted non-violent tactics for social change such as the massive March on Washington (1963), although he never witnessed his dream of a United States in which all Americans would have racial and economic justice. King’s vision of racial justice and love, provided hope and opportunity to African Americans beset by daily hardship and injustice and the impetus to initiate far-reaching social and political change. His ability to transform the struggle for racial equality into a vision with understandable, concrete and actionable goals sustained and empowered the civil rights movement. Furthermore his strong convictions and moral courage in challenging the status quo were matched by a value system of rejecting material trappings and conventional symbols of success.
As the founder of a movement of non-violent resistance that challenged the status quo and transformed the lives of Americans in the