A New Perspective on Leadership, Justice, and Purpose

From the desk of Chuck Fuller, CEO of the Results Company

Sometimes, we look at something that’s always been there and we see it for the first time. It seems those points cluster around certain periods of life: The first taste of being a “free” teenager, or the reality-changing weight of responsibility after a first child.
 
Or sometimes, as for me today, we see something for the first time because age carried to us the humility to open our eyes and look around.
 
I’ve led The Results Company for 27 years, and not once in all that time did I close our office to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Taking another day off so close to Christmas and New Year’s seemed unnecessary. But I should have, and I am this year, and will in the future.
 
I knew about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s courage, speeches, and sacrifice. I knew that his life’s work heralded a legal and cultural change that this country badly needed for two centuries. I knew all this and I respected him as a historical figure.
 
But I write a lot in these pages about purpose, and that man’s purpose stands with the other great leaders of American history like Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington. Like all leaders in the time they lived, MLK was controversial. And he, like the others, probably didn’t live up to his own standards all the time. But he had a deep and enduring impact on the American project – he pulled back the curtain and, through the power of his words, showed the country that it wasn’t keeping the promises it had made.
 
I find it difficult to identify many examples in our country’s background of a leader who did more to push America towards a better, more principled future than MLK. He led with purpose and conviction. And he had the courage to double down on what he knew to be right, even at risk of his own life.
 
A passage from Jon Meacham’s American Gospel got me thinking about all of this. It helped me see something that’s always been there. I commend it now to you. If you feel it appropriate, please pass this message along to others.
 
“THE SONS OF GOD WILL SHOUT FOR JOY”
Sunday, March 31, 1968, was cloudy with a threat of rain in the capital. King climbed the thirteen steps into the cathedral’s ten-foot-high pulpit, one carved from stone that had come from Canterbury Cathedral. . . Lifting his eyes, King would have seen the vast stained-glass Rose Window on the west wall and the flags of the fifty states of the Union hanging in parallel rows high atop the great nave. He was pleased to note, too, that the church was crowded: like politicians and actors, preachers love a full house.
 
He made the most of the moment. . . We are, King said, called to do right, to seek justice, to alleviate poverty. “Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation,” he said. “America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.” At the heart of his sermon was the religious idea of ultimate judgment — that we are not only moral agents on Earth who should be kind and generous for the sake of being kind and generous, but that if we are not, we will face a reckoning beyond time. A secular speaker can urge an audience toward benevolence on humane or rational grounds. A preacher has something more: the promise (or threat) of future reward or punishment. “One day we will have to stand before the God of history, and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done,” King said. “Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas. We built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.” His voice echoing across the Gothic church, he went on, evoking the teachings of Jesus: “It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me? That’s the question facing America today.”
 
So many questions: questions of race and poverty, war and peace. They were, King said, problems of the spirit, and any answer, according to King, would be found in the central American force: liberty. To him there was no distinction between the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the laws of the Lord. “We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands,” he said. “And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent the explosions are, I can still sing, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ We shall overcome because the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Finally, citing the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, King evoked “a new Jerusalem. . .a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy. God bless you.” With those words he turned and stepped back down to the floor of the nave. He had four days to live.
 
He was a prophet and a martyr, crying for justice so that the world might become more like what many people believed God wanted it to be. He was a minister of the Gospel; others who suffered and died to deliver America from its sins of slavery or bigotry or segregation were the children of Israel; others who put on the uniform of America to deliver the world from the evils of totalitarianism or injustice were asked to fight the good fight not because of their faith but because of the nation’s faith in liberty and in human rights.
 
King’s call had always been for a fulfillment of the Founders’ will–to make good on the “promissory note” he had spoken of at the Lincoln Memorial–and no more. In the jammed cathedral (those who could not fit inside listened to the service over loudspeakers outside or in St. Alban’s parish down the hill), the organ swelled, and the congregation sang. . .
 
Upward still and onward went King, back to Memphis, where, at dusk on the following Thursday, April 4, he was shot down as he stepped from Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, falling backward on the balcony. The Passion of Martin Luther King, Jr., was complete, and the promise of the Founding closer to fulfillment.
 
In his eulogy for King at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 9, Benjamin Mays, the retired president of Morehouse, linked King with figures who did what God intended for them to do, whatever the price, whatever the hardship: Jesus, Saint Paul, the founders of ancient Israel: “Moses leading a rebellious people to the Promised Land; Jesus dying on a cross; Galileo on his knees recanting at seventy; Lincoln dying of an assassin’s bullet; Woodrow Wilson crusading for a League of Nations; Martin Luther King, Jr., fighting for justice for garbage collectors none of these men were ahead of their time,” said Mays. “With them, the time is always ripe to do that which is right and that which needs to be done.”
 
Like the Founders, King had confronted a world he found wanting, and he changed it. Like them, he did not perfect it no one could, or can. And like them, he drew on the City of God in order to transform the City of Man–not to create a theocracy or to force beliefs on others, but to make a claim on the moral sense of the nation, a sense shaped by, but not limited to, familiar faiths. The men of the American Revolution had done this in making the case for independence and for the God-given natural rights of man, so had Lincoln, as he fought to save the Union and to extend the recognition of those rights to the slaves whom the Founders had left in chains, so had Franklin Roosevelt, in marshaling the forces of government to help the down-trodden at home and to defeat tyranny and totalitarianism abroad. Now, burying King, Mays rightly ranked the thirty-nine-year-old Baptist preacher with the great deliverers of history. “He belonged to the world and to mankind,” Mays said of King. “Now he belongs to posterity.”
 
One hundred and three Aprils before, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had said much the same of the murdered Lincoln: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Mays had a more recently martyred president on his mind, though. “I close by saying to you what Martin Luther King, Jr., believed: ‘If physical death was the price he had to pay to rid America of prejudice and injustice, nothing could be more redemptive.’ And to paraphrase the words of the immortal John Fitzgerald Kennedy, permit me to say that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s unfinished work on earth must truly be our own.”
 
 
Respectfully Submitted,