"Nonviolence can touch men where the law cannot reach them." These words, uttered by the late civil right's leader himself, were the fundamental tenet of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life. These words, though few in number, are great in power. These words, simple, plain, and concise, provide a rubric with which to investigate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s creative genius and intelligence.
Howard Gardner, eminent contemporary psychological theorist promoting the concept of multiple intelligences, investigates the lives of seven geniuses of the modern era in his book Creating Minds (1993). While Martin Luther King, Jr., falls more or less at the tail end of the modern era, investigating his creative genius is nonetheless instructive. Of the seven intelligences, King remarkably embodied the interpersonal and verbal/linguistic intelligences, showed indications of high interpersonal intelligence, showed aptitude in the musical/rhythmic, visual/spatial, and body/kinesthetic intelligences, and seemed to lack proficiency in the logical/mathematical intelligence.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was the middle child of three with an older sister Christine and a younger brother A.D. Martin's father was a reverend and his mother mostly stayed at home. King was an intense family man, revered his father, respected his mother, and had a special companion relationship with his brother.
A mentor of King's once said in reference to his young prodigy that "Gandhi's are not born, they invent themselves." As a child, certain characteristics were evident regarding the creative genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. Signs of strength in the verbal/linguistic, the interpersonal, the intrapersonal, and the kinesthetic intelligences were evident. Certainly King enjoyed his innate interpersonal talent and habitually worked on his verbal and kinesthetic abilities. Critically, he took advantage of his blessed disposition in an unique time in American history, a time that demanded just such a person with just such skills.
Early on in childhood, Michael King (later he changed his name to Martin Luther) demonstrated extraordinary verbal and interpersonal skills and was keenly aware of what others were thinking of him. For example, he surrounded himself with books not only to read them, but also to show them to others so that they would admire him for his apparent prodigious facility and understanding in countless subjects. Later in adolescence, he spent an extraordinary amount of his paper route paycheck on nice clothes; he wanted others to take him and his words seriously. King stood out from his peers proudly and often.
Interestingly, King was extremely moody and emotional when he was a child, and reflected the spirit of his environment well. While he eschewed any adversarial confrontations, King occasionally would indicate his kinesthetic abilities and settle differences by "taking it to the grass," i.e., wrestle. Throughout adolescence and into college, the young wrestler offered brilliant physical coordination "on the mats" and often won his formal and informal matches.
King's abhorrence of violence and adversarial situations almost reached pathological proportions. When his brother A.D. accidentally injured his maternal grandmother, who ended up dying from the injury, Martin tried to commit suicide by jumping out a second story window. A few years later, when a neighbor had a heart attack and died after he had watched a parade with her, he again tried to commit suicide by jumping from that same window. These events are illustrative of his lifelong desire to assume the sufferings of others to the point of subjecting himself to immolation or death. Perhaps fittingly, his favorite song was "I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus." He seemed willing to die for the violence and sins of others, so that they may have a better, more fulfilled life. This uncanny, obsessive trait of being able to feel what others feel, hope what others hope, and fear what others fear, is the essence of the interpersonal intelligence and is what launched King into his educational development of effective public rhetoric.
Especially through his formal education, King began to marginalize himself among his peers and society. Aside from the obvious marginality of being Black in America in the 1950's and 1960's, King pushed himself further to edge of American society through his intellect and education.
King skipped both the ninth and twelfth grades and entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at the age of 15. His sharp intelligence and maturity placed him at the forefront of his peers, forcing him to learn how to deal constantly with "being on stage" and being in the public eye. His favorite and chief extracurricular passion was the debate team, an activity that measurably furthered his innate rhetorical skills. In high school, he won the Elks annual oratorical prize for his presentation on "The Negro and the Constitution."
At Morehouse, King was determined to be a physician. Soon, however, he learned he was relatively lacking in the logical/mathematical intelligence and was not scientifically gifted. Sensing a future of professional social prominence, King took aim at studying law. Soon, however, he recognized his love for people, his proclivity for understanding people in social systems, and his incessant analysis of how people reacted in different situations. He decided to major in sociology.
His junior year he met George Kelsey and Benjamin Mays, two professors that challenged the young King to think seriously about the ministry. From them, and from his reverend father, King developed his deep Christian concern for the brotherhood of man and his abiding faith in the fundamental decency of the human race. Studying religion at Boston University, King magnified his intense intrapersonal reflection on his world view and on his expectations of himself, of his country, and of the world. Here, too, is where he developed his view on education. He said "I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education - the tools with which to exploit the trusting masses for its own material security" and that the others "wanted a bachelor's degree to launch them to prestige and privilege." King believed the function of education was to "teach one to think intensively and to think critically." He continued to say that "the most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals." Thus, through his subsequent intense study of people and religion at Morehouse College, and later at Boston University, Martin Luther King, Jr., perfected his uniquely powerful interpersonal and verbal skills that would catapult him to the forefront of arguably the most important socio-political movement in twentieth-century America.
Upon arriving in India in early 1959, King said to a crowd of people, "To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim. This is because India means to me Mahatma Gandhi, a truly great man of the age." During this pilgrimage, King was to reflect upon the dichotomy between the Indian government's social concern, and the United States government's apparent lack of it.
A lecturer at the Delhi School of Economics, Dr. R. K. Unnithan, had spontaneously visited King in his hotel room and gave an extemporaneous, but thorough, explanation of Satyagraha, the primordial source of Indian nonviolence and essential Gandhian philosophy. Unnithan's research project was "The Sociology of Nonviolence" and he played a major influence in solidifying the concept of nonviolence in King's life. Nonviolence can be traced to the origins of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism through Christianity to Tolstoi and Thoreau.
King was often inclined to explain in vivid and moving detail his dreams and visions. Indicating his visual/spatial intelligence, he once remarked to his congregation back in Montgomery that he had perceived or imagined during the uprising in Montgomery a near Agape and Satyagraha. Agape was love seeking to preserve and create community that, in Gandhian terms, took a step beyond the pragmatic passivism of Thoreau, another important King influence. Satyagraha is described by Gandhi as something that "differs from passive resistance as the North Pole from the South. The latter has been conceived as a weapon of the weak and does not exclude the use of physical force or violence for the purpose of gaining one's end, whereas the former has been conceived as a weapon of the strongest and excludes the use of violence in any shape or form." The nine tactical adherents of Satyagraha that became the lifeblood of King's public speeches, sermons, writings, and actions follow. King did not fully adopt all nine, but preached and practiced their general approach:
Accordingly, King adapted and interpreted the Gandhian philosophy to apply directly and pragmatically to his principal constituents, Black Americans. The pragmatic adoption of this philosophy of nonviolence in the Black Americans tradition can be traceable to the numerically determined fact that the American black cannot utilize violence on a collective scale for very long, or very often. King admitted this rather environmental and deterministic inevitability with reluctance, and focused on nonviolence as an emotional, righteous, and noble enterprise to undertake.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was an unusual man living in an extraordinary time. He was endowed with ample intelligence, great courage and convictions, and a commanding presence. But his unique leadership also derived from forces external. King himself had incessant references to the "zeitgeist," or spirit of the times, and how this spirit created who he was. He defined himself as a charismatic leader who, in the spirit of the times, rose to the challenge of embodying the civil rights movement in America.
King produced moving sermonic power in his rhetoric and public discourse, guided by his verbal/linguistic and interpersonal genius. Rhetoric is the "art of emphasis embodying an order of desire" says scholar Richard M. Weaver. To be as effective as King, the rhetor needs to establish himself as the "leader" who argues for a "community" of which he is a part. He must establish key values that audience members and the speaker have in common, such as King's countless references to the Bible, to geography, and to common human experience. Pragmatically, the rhetor's success is judged by his ability to "adjust ideas to people and people to ideas." In the case of King, consider the following famous example of two excerpts of his "I Have a Dream" speech given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, in the fall of 1963:
"I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its racists, with its Governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers..."
"Let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we're free at last.'"
Described by one linguistic scholar, King's "I Have a Dream" speech was not a legal brief on the intricacies of the civil right's movement in America, nor an "intellectual treatise on the plight of black people." Rather, it was a "fervent emotional sermon, forged out of the language and spirit of democracy. King's mastery of the spoken word, his magnetism, and his sincerity raised familiar platitudes from clicheŚ to commandment." Although King did not ever indicate a particular propensity for adept musicality, the rhythmic consequences of his moving speeches offer evidence for his musical/rhythmic intelligence. His speeches, though lacking any sort of tonal pattern, produced various environmentally sensitive reverberations that emotionally swept and physically moved masses of people.
In 1956 King began to lace all his discourses with Gandhian terminology. He was becoming a national figure who appealed especially to the young generation of blacks. After speaking, King would always chat and meet with people informally. Some were mesmerized, others saw his unabashed sensationalism and hated him for it. That next January, he wrote "When I returned to Montgomery over the weekend, I found the Negro community in low spirits" (after the boycott of the public transport system). There was deep depression in the first days following the boycott. Mayor Gayle was threatening to use violence to shut the system down indefinitely. Embodying the mood of the community, King alarmed the crowd with a morbid reference to his own death. King shouted in the middle of a prayer on Jan 14, 1957, "Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery. Certainly I don't want to die, but if anyone has to die, let it be me." A chilling harbinger nine years before his public assassination.
Between 1954, when he became minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and 1968, when an assassin's fatal bullet pierced his neck, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave more than 3000 public speeches. King's public appearances were as moving as they were prolific, and as loved as they were hated. During this ascension to socio-political icon of the 1960's and remarkable public ubiquity, King persuaded as much with sincerity as he did with fact and logic. Unfortunately, in this unusual time in America's history, it was King's prominence that not only moved many to racial reconciliation and compassion, but also uncovered the racial enmity rooted so deeply in this country's soil, that King himself would prophesize his own, martyred death.
King admitted that his nobility and charisma derived principally from his moralization of the plight of Black Americans in simplistic terms. This focus grudgingly enlightened a few Southern Whites and was championed by many Northern Whites. Principally, King was the "echo chamber of the racially oppressed." This echo chamber, however, engendered rounder, more intelligible, and much more polite sounds than what many American's had been used to by popular public icons in the past. King drew a stark contrast with the much more violent and revolutionary Malcom X. Nonetheless, support for King was divided sharply along racial lines, and his own life marginalized ever further.
He didn't tell Whites what they wanted to hear. Rather, his generous nature and biblical imprecision provided an ideal environment for personal interpretation whatever the race. Brilliantly, he would incorporate notions of universality with both specific and varied references, and with deliberately ambiguous speech. But it was the use of Gandhian passive resistance that exposed the inherent limitations of racial compromise and gradualism in a society so dominated for so long by the majority race. King wanted and demanded change.
Festering was White backlash and Black Power. The most disillusioned Blacks and the most powerful Whites loathed King's moral consistency and nonviolent tactical approach. King had polarized through his amazing public rhetoric much of America, and pushed himself to the edge of socio-political idealism and revolutionary reform. In his last public appearance, on April 4, 1967, James Earl Ray shot and killed King in Memphis, Tennessee. Perhaps the effectiveness of King's public rhetoric and resulting polarization can best be summed up by a sentence from Dr. May's eulogy at King's funeral:
"But make no mistake, the American people are in part responsible for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death. The assassin heard enough condemnation of King and of Negroes to feel that he had public support. He knew that millions hated King."
Ultimately, through his meticulous development of innate personal skills, through intrapersonal reflection and commanding interpersonal presence, Martin Luther King, Jr., became an immensely public figure. King recognized his personal strengths and weaknesses, and focused on his talents. Through effective rhetoric, King polarized masses of people. He dug deeply and quickly to the root of two centuries of racial hatred in America and boldly, yet peacefully, represented the civil rights' movement and plight of an oppressed African culture in a Eurocentric America. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., unabashedly and incessantly wielded his most prolific and natural Gardnerian power, the power of interpersonal intelligence - to preach and practice his espoused Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence. In the process, King gave up a quiet private life, security for himself and his family, and ultimately his life.
Calloway-Thomas, Carolyn, and Lucaites, John Louis. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1993.
Gardner, Howard. Creating Minds. BasicBooks, New York, 1993.
Lewis, David Levering. King: A Biography. University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1978.
Schulke, Flip. Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Documentary...Montgomery to Memphis. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., Toronto, 1976.