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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years ago

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The Great Drive: James Hunt and Niki Lauda at Fuji, 1976

I feel really sorry for Niki. I feel sorry for everybody that the race had to be run in such ridiculous circumstances because the conditions were dangerous and I fully appreciate Niki’s decision. After an accident like he had, what else could he do? Quite honestly, I wanted to win the championship and I felt I deserved it. But I also felt Niki deserved to win the championship – and I just wish we could have shared it.

- James Hunt on winning the Japanese Grand Prix 1976 to become F1 World Champion

James Hunt’s epic title battle with Niki Lauda, during what many see as the definitive F1 season, was topped off by a thrilling race in the land of the rising sun. It became an instant classic, one of F1’s Great Drives.

With everything to lose, in treacherous conditions, and with late drama, James Hunt's drive in the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix was one of the greatest of all time.

James Hunt delivered his greatest drive in spite of himself. It wasn’t just the peak moment of his career, but also a defining drive for F1.

The British gentleman racer conquering the world’s best in far away lands – Hunt embodied it.

Despite this, the Brit’s landmark drive came in the midst of late night escapades, mechanical disasters, psychological warfare and F1 politics.

As the ‘76 season approached its climax in North America and Asia, it seemed all might be lost for the McLaren team and its lead driver. Hunt had been duelling with Ferrari’s Niki Lauda throughout the year, but losing his British Grand Prix win to disqualification (announced by the FIA at Round 14 in Canada) seemed to have derailed his season for good.

McLaren team manager at the time Alastair Caldwell describes the state of affairs as they approached the North American leg of the season: “We abandoned the idea of winning the world championship. I let him misbehave in Canada and in Watkins Glen. On both occasions we were pissed on race eve, both of us in a bar after midnight getting rotten – me on alcohol and him on women, because he was always very successful with women.

“James met a girl – the leader of the band at the motel in Montreal – and so he came to the race dishevelled, in the same clothes as he’d been wearing the previous night – and he won the race!

“Even then we still thought we were out of it. Then we won Watkins Glen too! So suddenly we became serious again.”

Lauda had scored 4 points to Hunt’s 18 in this period. With the championship fight back on, the rejuvenated team and driver looked at the season finale in a new light. The championship fight was back on, and as a result, McLaren prepared for the Japanese GP with renewed vigour.

James Hunt had been in Japan a fortnight, ostensibly to test at a circuit new to him. Delays at customs, car problems and bad weather had severely restricted his running, but at least now he was totally orientated and, in his inimitable fashion, ‘relaxed’. That meant when he wasn’t strutting his stuff on the hotel’s squash court, he was billing and cooing with its latest migratory flock of pretty air stewardesses to bed. It beat jogging.

Lauda arrived later, low-key and at a low ebb. The spirit that held the demons at bay during his remarkable Monza comeback had evaporated in Canada and America. Now running on empty, he was full of doubts. While Ferrari team manager Daniele Audetto attempted to whip up retro oppo to McLaren’s ‘illegal’ testing, his star driver looked the other way and wished it over: Lauda was sick of Enzo and his minions, of a season in its 10th month and of press intrusion.

McLaren’s earlier preparations were in sharp contrast to the rest of the field who arrived just for the race weekend itself. According to Caldwell, “The others all turned up on the Thursday, including Niki, you can see them all get off the plane knackered and then trying to find where this new racetrack was.”

It wasn’t just through testing and acclimatisation that Hunt and McLaren stole a march. Caldwell thought he might use interactions with the press to his advantage: “Just for a laugh we spread a rumour. A journalist said to me ‘what’s the track like?�� I said ‘It’s is good but it’s got a lot of loose gravel on it.’”

Enjoying the effect the track surface story had on the rest of the field’s preparations, Caldwell thought he’d develop the rumour into a full-blown design feature.

“Because we were bored and had nothing else to do, the mechanics made mesh covers for all the air intakes on the car, to “protect” the brake ducts and air intake.

“Then Niki (Lauda) came down to our garage, which he always did – he spent more time in our garage then Ferrari’s. He would joke with us and do mechanic’s repartee.

“Psychologically we had them on the back foot right from the start.”

“Niki had come to see what we’d done with the cars as he was also a spy. So I told the mechanics, ‘just by mistake’, to take the covers off the cars so you could see the mesh covers on all the intakes. They did this and then they put it back on in a hurry while I ‘looked displeased’.

“And so then Niki broke off the conversation, trotted back to Ferrari and said ‘f**king hell, McLaren have put vents near these grilles over everything in the car, we got to do the same.’

“The whole Ferrari organisation went out to find these grilles, find where they came from and make them for their three cars. Then we put our three cars in the pit road and took all the grilles off the T-Car. Niki came down and said ‘You f**king bastards!’ They came down the pitroad and Ferrari had this shit all over their car – these grilles all over the radiators.

“He had to tear back and tell them to take them all off. Psychologically we had them on the back foot right from the start, there’s all this psychological warfare.”

Niki was plastered across front pages because of his near-death experience on the track; James was on them because of the life he led off it. Their battle and clashing personalities, though they were good friends, had made the world championship a global news shit-fight. Hunt, outgoing but often lonely in a crowd, pretended to be okay with it. Lauda didn’t.

Friday’s practice sessions provided blessed relief, therefore, even though both men suffered understeer on the stickier Goodyears made available to its faster teams because of the rare presence of Bridgestone and Dunlop on one-off Japanese entries. The title rivals finished the day one-hundredth apart on a provisional third row.

Each improved on Saturday – Hunt to second, Lauda to third – and James, a notoriously slow starter who, by his own estimation, needed to win the race in order to become world champion, was in a much-improved mood. Niki’s never budged.

Then it rained. And rained. And rained some more.

The storm that swept in from China a day later than forecast was the last thing Lauda needed: another element beyond his control. Mist shrouded the snow cone of Mount Fuji, which supposedly bestowed good fortune – when visible – and Niki felt hemmed in by circumstance.

The mind-games might well have been in vain, for the monsoon weather which rolled in on Sunday looked like putting the race in jeopardy. If the Grand Prix was cancelled, Lauda would be handed the World Championship.

Not that Hunt was enamoured with the situation. He spoke privately with Lauda and agreed an attempt to have the race postponed – albeit not before he stressed that he would take the start if necessary and race as hard as Niki forced him to.

The Grand Prix Drivers Association had been formed to have some influence on such matters, to stop the interests of teams, the governing body and sponsors taking precedence over drivers’ well being. Hunt and Lauda were both members and convened prior to the race start in an effort to have it stopped.

“They were adamant the race wasn’t going to be held. Bernie (Ecclestone, Brabham team boss) and I were in the race control tower trying to convince them to hold the race.” says Caldwell “And James kept on saying ‘No no, we’re not going to race’. I tried to explain to him that no race meant no World Championship. He replied “No, no, no, it’s totally unsuitable, we can’t race”.

Alistair Caldwell, McLaren Team boss, resorted to more imaginative tactics to swing the mood towards starting the race.

“I was going down (to the pits) getting my car mechanics to start the engines every half an hour, which would make all the other teams start doing it – they didn’t know why. The engines were making this noise ‘woop, woop, woop’”.

The engineer then turned his attention to activating the spectators.

“I was trying to get some enthusiasm from the passive Japanese crowd, they’d been there for hours doing nothing. They weren’t even talking, just sitting in the rain – miserable.

“I said to our tyre man Lance Gibbs ‘Do you think you could get the crowd going?’ So he got up on the pitwall with his ACME Thunderer whistle, which had been given to the boys to use as a horn, for when they pushed the race cars around the paddock.

“He went ‘beep beep’ and hundreds of spectators did the same – got them doing a concert. We then did the business of slow clapping, when it gets to the end, people can’t keep up, they lose co-ordination and you get a huge noise.

“I went back to the tower and the geriatric Japanese officials and said, ‘Look, you’ve got a riot on your hands’ Bernie was there and he said ‘Yeah, you’ve gotta hold the race. Otherwise you’ll have trouble’. So they said ‘Ok we’ll have the race.’”

With the decision made, the cars finally lined up to start at 4pm. The deliberations had been going on so long that the light was now beginning to fade, reducing the limited visibility even further.

Hunt, nervously retching and hacking more than ever, was so distracted that he took a leak in full view of the spectators. Cue polite applause. Ominously, he then walked a plank laid across a puddle and stepped aboard his McLaren M23. He tipped his helmet back against its roll-hoop and closed his eyes in contemplation. Lauda, crushed by all that had gone before, hunched forward in his 312 T2’s cockpit. Both knew that fate was about to be sorely tempted.

Hunt made a blinding start and held a huge lead by the end of the opening lap. As the rest pecked hesitantly in his rooster-tails, he was out of sight, both physically and metaphorically.

Meanwhile, Lauda, unable to blink because of his burn injuries, was drowning in the pack and questioning his sanity. He formulated an answer by lap two. The Ferrari – “a paper boat in a storm” – rolled into the pitlane and drew up at its garage. Measured. The team descended while designer Mauro Forghieri craned into its cockpit to ascertain the problem.

After just 1 lap, Lauda had seen enough. Deeming the conditions too dangerous, and having already nearly lost his life at Nürburgring that year, the Austrian decided it simply wasn’t worth carrying on. He pulled his Ferrari into the pits and walked away from the 1976 World Championship. Lauda, the reigning world champion, had the skill but not the will to continue. It was “murder�� out there – and life was for living.

Hunt, as drivers without a world title feel compelled to, pressed on and kept his date with destiny. Hunt being Hunt, of course, he almost missed it. Not until his post-race red mist lifted could he be persuaded that he hadn’t.

With Lauda out the race, Hunt’s task was now a little more straightforward. He simply had to finish third, and the title was his.

The McLaren driver pressed on and by lap 10 his lead had doubled to over 8sec. Meanwhile, interesting movements were afoot further back in the pack.

Local hero Kazuyoshi Hoshino, driving a privately-entered Tyrrell 007, had made his up to third, from 21st on the grid!

More worrying for Hunt was that March’s Vittorio Brambilla had overtaken Andretti and was beginning to hunt him down. By lap 20, Brambilla had closed right up behind the Hunt.

On the next lap, the March driver decided to go for it. Brambilla, known for an erratic driving style, conformed to type on this occasion by inadvertently out-braking himself as he dived down the inside of the McLaren.

Hunt had been wary of Brambilla and was monitoring the situation constantly. In a moment of brilliant anticipation, he allowed the March to spin in front of him, performing the cutback and before carrying on as if almost nothing had happened.

Brambilla dropped to fourth, the danger to Hunt being over for now. Andretti at this point was gradually dropping back through the pack. It was Hunt’s team-mate Jochen Mass who was behind him now, with a McLaren 1-2 now looking very much on the cards.

Seeking to control the race from here on in, the team’s new concern was the drying line which was now appearing on the track. Caldwell put out a pit board sign telling his drivers to cool their wet weather tyres – this was done by searching for wet sections of the track, the water preventing the rubber from overheating.

To his team manager’s frustration, Hunt didn’t appear to be heeding the warnings: “As soon as Mass saw the sign, he pulled over in the water right in front of us. Then on the next lap he came down the right hand side of the track, splashing through the puddles, which cools the tires down, (while) James didn’t react.

“The next lap we gave it to Hunt again, the next lap again, he still didn’t do it. So we took away the pitboard, just gave him the ‘cool tyres’ sign and he still didn’t react. So then everyone in the team started pointing at it (the sign). Everybody in the team pointed, Teddy (Mayer, McLaren Managing Director) and everyone else and he still did nothing.”

Hunt carried on down the dry line, running his tyres way above their recommended temperature, seemingly oblivious to the warnings.

If Hunt wasn’t going to heed the warnings, then Andretti was: “Because we were emphasising this so much, Andretti saw it and started to cool his tyres. So he started running through the puddles. He didn’t have to stop (as a result).

“But James just resolutely drove down the middle of the dry track, and we could never bring him in, because he was never that far ahead. It was never possible to tactically stop him because there’s a big long pitroad at Fuji.”

Jochen Mass, benefitting from his team’s tyre advice, now began to reel in his team-mate. If he got past, he would have no trouble driving off into the distance to take the win.

However, the German’s diligence came to naught, as he spun off and out of contention on lap 36. This would have a huge bearing on the race later.

For now, Hunt was again in the clear. Another challenger, Shadow’s Tom Pryce, moved into second, but he too retired as his Cosworth engine expired on lap 46.

As the grand prix wore on, Hunt remained in a seemingly trance-like state as he stuck to his line, the situation became critical.

Whilst yet another to danger to Hunt had abated, the McLaren driver was now deciding whether to play the percentages. He could either pit to replace his worn tyres – and lose track position – or try and stick it out at the risk of losing so much grip he would be overtaken anyway.

Hunt took the second option. He could afford to drop to third, and this is indeed what happened. On lap 61, he was overtaken not only by Tyrrell’s Patrick Depailler, but also the resurgent Lotus of Andretti.

If Hunt managed to hold position, he would be world champion. For the next 7 laps, the plan appeared to be working. Then, on lap 68, disaster struck.

The McLaren driver suffered not one, but two deflated tyres – both on the left-hand side of the car. They were, as Caldwell puts it, “worn down to the air”. Hunt managed to drag his car round for half a lap before scraping into the pits.

F1 jacks at the time were not designed to lift a car with puncture at the front and rear of the car. While the jack was used to lift the rear of the car, TV shots show Caldwell and other team members lifting the other end of the car themselves to replace the front-left tyre.

It was a long pitstop, and once out, Hunt found himself back in fifth place. There were four laps left and Hunt was two places down on where he needed to be.

Two more laps passed and the Englishman was no further up the order. It looked as if he may have lost his championship chance.

Then, with two laps left of the race to go, Hunt started the fight back. At the exit of T1 he managed to get past the Surtees of Alan Jones. One more place and the championship was his.

Next up was the Ferrari of Clay Regazzoni. It turned out there were some Scuderia politics at play which would work to Hunt’s advantage.

Caldwell filled in the back story: “Ferrari’s reaction to Niki’s crash was to sack Regazzoni (for 1977). He had already been sacked (by Fuji).

“So he was pissed off at Ferrari. When James came charging along, he just stepped out of the way and let him by.”

After benefitting from Regazzoni’s apparent generosity, Hunt was suddenly back in the golden position, the third place he needed to clinch the championship.

The McLaren man just had to keep it on the road for two more laps and he’d take the title. The tension mounted, both in the team pit and back in the UK, where his family were watching the live television feed at 3am.

Despite two nerve-wracking final laps, the Englishman duly brought his McLaren home in third place. He was the new F1 World Champion.

Photographs show Hunt angrily remonstrating with his team as he climbed from the car. He hadn’t realised he’d got the job done.

Caldwell himself had mixed emotions about the whole affair, “He didn’t look at the board and when he came into the pits he started shouting at us, because he didn’t know what happened. He was incredibly annoying on the day. He did drive magnificently, he kept it on the road – that’s one point of view. From my point of view it was the most frustrating day – I could’ve hit him with a baseball bat! He could have won the race, just strolled the world championship. All he had to do was read this pitboard and drive in the water, which is what Andretti did, so he didn’t wear the tyres out and could paddle across the line with the same ones.”

In spite of Hunt seemingly making a championship-losing decision, he had still managed to pull it off.

However, such was Caldwell’s consternation, the two didn’t discuss afterwards.

I was so angry about it. We flew back to England and I wasn’t talking to him on the plane. He was pissed as a newt anyway – we were all pissed as a newt and totally exhausted. He just went to sleep.”

The two never discussed the reasons behind the events, but it didn’t change the result. Three years after making his F1 debut, Hunt was the world champion.

Ten weeks later Hunt arrived in Argentina to begin his title defence feeling underwhelmed and under-prepared. A few celebratory cigs and tins with his friend Britain’s newly crowned 500cc motorcycle world champion, Barry Sheene, at Fuji and a riotous return flight had been followed by a disorientating whirl of meetings, interviews and engagements. The race-by-race title chase had been thrilling: a sequence of one-day stands. Making it official had cooled the relationship. The love affair was over.

Though both men would retire summarily during the 1979 season, Hunt did so because he felt frightened and disillusioned, whereas Lauda did so because he felt nothing, which frightened him.

Niki, though, had a system – plus a plan to run his own airline – and ultimately would return to the F1 cockpit and be successful. James, whose theories were sometimes somewhat scrambled, would not. He bred budgies instead. You do what you have to do.

Lauda’s decision to stop at Fuji ensured that he would be able to continue. Hunt’s decision to continue ensured that he would have to stop sooner rather than later. One racing mind wiped clean, the other cluttered – and racing.

In spite of his career’s decline, Hunt’s endeavours had captured the imagination of the wider world in a way no racing driver had done before.Hunt knew that life was for living, too. Tragically, however, he had just discovered how best to when fate too soon snatched it from him.

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formuladanf1 · 3 years ago

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My 2023 F1 Driver Line Up Predictions:

Haas

1. Mazepin

2. Giovinazzi

Mazepin will stay because of the money. He brings in sponsorship with a billionaire father to a team that seems likely to leave after every season as they don’t have much to play around with. Giovinazzi will return to F1 in the second Haas seat. Haas has been shifting towards what Alfa Romeo used to be, a Ferrari academy driver seat. With Zhou stopping that trend at Alfa, Schumacher, and Haas’s connection with Ferrari (their engine and resources) for the future. We also know that Gio will be competing in Formula E this year, a Championship that has equal cars aside from set-up prowess. With more exposure to a new fan base, and a chance for him to showcase his true talent Giovinazzi has the chance to gain more sponsors and experience that will facilitate him coming back to the F1 grid. Both Ferrari and Giovinazzi was optimistic that the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix would not be his last in F1

Aston Martin

3. Stroll

4. Schumacher

I believe Vettel will retire after 2022. He will have had 2 years of development for Aston Martin and will want to walk away from the sport happy. He was clearly not happy with Ferrari and didn’t want to leave with a bitter taste in his mouth. Also, Laurence Stroll is a businessman, through and through. He knows the market value that the Schumacher name. To have the son of the greatest Formula 1 driver of all time (Hamilton is coming into contention with this) brings in even more money and resources. Along with his market value, Schumacher is an excellent racing driver that truly does have championship potential. He is an F2 champion and will hopefully one day be an F1 champion. Vettel will back all of that up with the mentorship role he has taken over Mick as Michael once did with Vettel. If this were going to be the case, then it would be a very smooth transition to the new team!

Red Bull

5. Verstappen

6. Perez

This formula has proven to give Mercedes a run for their money. With both drivers performing at high levels plus the Perez sponsorship money, it is likely Red Bull will keep what they have for ‘23.

Ferrari

7. Sainz

8. Leclerc

Sainz has shown that he is a star in this Ferrari. He outperformed Leclerc in his first year with the Scuderia and adapted so quickly to the car. The Ferrari world have fallen in love with Sainz, and it is unlikely that he will leave after just two years. However, while Schumacher develops at Haas, he will be a contender for the 2024 Ferrari drive. Leclerc wants to be champion in a Ferrari, and he is still under contract.

McLaren

9. Norris

10. Hamilton

Norris Just signed his big extension and I believe that after Hamilton has a dominant year in 2022, he will return to where it all started to finish out his career. McLaren is clearly a fun and enjoyable environment to work in and it seems like a great place for Hamilton to retire. Hamilton also thinks Lando Norris is an excellent driver and I believe he will want to work with him to push him even further as a driver, in a good way.

Mercedes:

11. George Russel

12. Daniel Riccardo

George Russel is clearly the future at Mercedes which is why he will stay in the seat going into 2023. Riccardo is here for a few reasons. The first being the Hamilton will win the drivers title in 2022, coming back stronger than ever after his heartbreak in Abu Dhabi 2021. Hamilton will have one more season in him and I think he will likely go back to McLaren, where he started his F1 journey. Many drivers have done this. Alonso is back at what used to be Renault, and Raikkonen, returned to Sauber where he got his start. Hamilton has been very impressed by Norris and thinks he is a future champion as well which could add to his decision to return.

Alpine

13. Ocon

14. Gasly

Alonso’s time in F1 could be coming to close. It really depends on Alpine’s performance in 2022. Alonso wants the put this team higher up the grid. If they have a bad year in 2022, he may take his talents elsewhere, spaces such as endurance racing where he won Les Mans. He may also go to IndyCar as he is still chasing the Indy 500 glory. Ocon Is likely to stay as he is a race winner with the outfit, and he also has really found a home in this team. He was booted from Racing Point. I believe Gasly will end up here to make this an all-French Line up which will bring in big French Sponsorship

Alpha Tauri

15. Tsunoda

16. Piastri

Piastri must be in F1 by 2023. It would be a shame to waste his talent. With Gasly predicted to move to Alpine, and the Red Bull young drivers not quite being ready for F1 in the next couple of years, Piastri is a likely candidate for the seat. Additionally, he will get a lot of experience in the 2022 Alpine car with the new regulations. Tsunoda will ink another year with the Italian team as he was on strong form at the end of the season. Red Bull wants to see him have a full year of consistency and pace before they even think about promoting or dropping him.

Alfa Romeo

17. Bottas

18. Zhou

Bottas has secured his future for time being the first time having a longer contract than just a year. This will allow Bottas to grow as a driver and leader. Zhou will also remain as I think its rare for rookies to be out after year 1. Also, the sponsorship money that he brings is too big to just throw him out after a year.

Williams

19. Latifi

20. Albon

While Williams fights its way back to the top, it is important to keep their lineup consistent. Latifi will be retained due to his high level of sponsorship and his continued improvement as a driver. In only his second season, there were weekends where he out qualified or out raced his teammate, George Russel. With Albon coming into the mix, and the fact that they were teammates in F2, it will be a productive environment.

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personalcoachingcenter · 3 years ago

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Emotional Intelligence and Career Success for Women

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/emotional-intelligence-and-career-success-for-women/

Emotional Intelligence and Career Success for Women

A Research Paper By Lauren Moy, Career Coach, UNITED STATES

Women Emotional Intelligence Progress During Pandemic

While women have made some progress, they still have a long way to go before they are equal to men. Only 7.4 % of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women, yet this is a record number. The pandemic has widened this gap. “Out of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce in September 2020, roughly 865,000 were women. Latinas and Black women are leaving at higher rates than white women. The financial price paid for the average woman who opts out and tries to re-enter the workforce is an 18% decrease in their earning power on average—and a 37% decrease when they’re out for three years or more. This will have a lasting impact on families and the U.S. economy. Senior-level women are 1.5 times more likely than senior-level men to think about downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce because of Covid-19, according to Lean In’s Women in the Workplace 2020 report. Almost three in four cite burnout as the main reason, with increased caregiving duties playing a big role. Reentering the workplace once you’ve left may mean taking a lower position, and a slower path to promotions.” 1 This research paper will cover:

What Emotional Intelligence is and its Benefits

Emotional Intelligence Assessment Tools

How Increasing EQ can Help Women Counter the 12 Habits that May Hold Them Back from Advancing in their Careers

Coaching with Emotional Intelligence

Research shows that women can become more effective leaders than men because women can manage conflict well, women encourage employees to grow and women have greater chances of influence.2 Women are more inclined than men to coach and mentor employees and give inspirational advice. This can help them excel in professional relationships. Women tend to focus on managing conflict well and mentoring others and less time focusing on how they can have more influence at work, while their male counterparts are more focused on growing their influence.

What Is Emotional Intelligence and Its Benefits?

According to Dr. Travis Bradberry, Award-winning co-author of the #1 best selling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, as well as The Seagull Manager and the cofounder of TalentSmart®, “Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships. Dr. Bradberry states that “Decades of research point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. Depending on the position, some roles require higher levels of EQ to be successful. Research showed that 90% of top performance is also high in Emotional Intelligence. On the flip side, just 20% of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. Naturally, people with a high degree of emotional intelligence make more money- an average of $29,000 more per year than people with a low degree of emotional intelligence.” 3

Emotional Intelligence Assessment Tools

There are several emotional intelligence tools on the market. These assessments can be a useful starting point to coach a client in improving their EI. Dr. Steven Stein is a clinical psychologist, and the founder and CEO of Multi-Health Systems (MHS), a leading publisher of scientifically validated assessments for more than 30 years. https://mhs.com/about-mhs/ MHS administers “the Emotional Quotient Inventory 2.0 (EQ-i 2.0) measures an individual’s emotional intelligence with five composite scores measuring distinct aspects of emotional and social functioning including 1) self-perception 2) self-expression 3) interpersonal 4) decision making and 5) stress management.4

“MHS also administers the Emotional Quotient 360 (EQ 360) is an emotional intelligence assessment that allows leaders to receive feedback from peers, managers, direct reports, and others on how they leverage their emotional intelligence.

How Increasing Eq Helps Women Counter 12 Habits That Hold Them Back

Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith’s book How Women Rise, Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back From Your Next Raise, Promotion or Job, presents the twelve habits that hold women back in their careers.

Knowing how these 12 habits may be linked to Emotional Quotient (EQ) may be helpful to a client in identifying the area(s) that she may want to focus on in coaching to help her get unstuck and advance in her career. Many women leaders can benefit from coaching especially when they were previously in a technical or single contributor role and are newly promoted to lead and manage a team of people. This requires a different set of skills and a higher level of EQ. Identifying some of these habits and creating a plan with goals and accountability can help women to grow in their EQ and advance in their careers.

Habit Holding Women Back EQ-I 2.0 Scale(s) that Can Affect the Habit How Increasing EQ can counter the Habit 1. Reluctance to claim your achievements Self-regard and assertiveness Self-regard is needed to say “Thank you” when receiving a compliment rather than dismissing the compliment which some women tend to do. Assertiveness is needed to speak up about your achievements. Many women are passed over for promotions because their achievements are not recognized. 2. Expecting others to spontaneously notice and reward your contributions Self-regard, assertiveness and Reality Testing Self-regard and assertiveness are needed to acknowledge and communicate one’s value and contributions. This is important when women are requesting a promotion or interviewing for jobs, Reality testing is needed to recognize when people may not notice unless you speak up and let them know about your contributions. 3. Overvaluing expertise Reality testing and interpersonal relationships Reality testing is needed to realize that not only is building skills important but also building connections to move you forward in your career. Interpersonal relationships are needed to build those connections. 4. Building rather than leveraging relationships Self-actualization and interpersonal relationships Self-actualization is needed to pursue promotions. Both self-actualization and interpersonal relationships are needed to believe in oneself to reach for higher levels. Women also need to think strategically and learn to leverage interpersonal relationships. 5. Failing to enlist allies from day one Reality testing, assertiveness Reality testing is needed to realize the importance of enlisting allies, mentors, and sponsors to help women advance to higher levels. Assertiveness is needed to take the initiative and reach out to others first. 6. Putting your job before your career Independence and assertiveness Independence is needed to not become dependent on others on the team and stay longer in one job because of your loyalty and relationships even though it is not best for your overall career. 7. The perfection trap Self-regard and stress tolerance Many perfectionist tendencies are linked to low self-regard, compensating for not feeling good enough. Low-stress tolerance and fear can keep women from taking risks, and stay in the same job for a long time, and can keep women from getting promoted. 8. The disease to please Self-regard and assertiveness Assertiveness is needed to set and communicate boundaries and say no. Self-regard is needed to prioritize one’s own needs and not only consider the needs of others. 9. Minimizing Self-regard, Emotional expression Self-regard is needed not to minimize one’s feelings, thoughts, and presence. Emotional expression is needed to communicate emotions and thoughts with confidence. For women to have executive presence, they need to maximize their space, both verbally and non-verbally. 10. Too much Self-awareness and empathy Women are often told by men that they overcommunicate and need to be more concise. Self-awareness helps one to identify and understand emotions. Empathy is needed to understand how the other may feel or respond if too many emotions or words are used so that adjustments can be made. 11. Ruminating (clinging to the past) Self-awareness, flexibility, and optimism Self-awareness is needed to realize the negative impact that ruminating is having on one’s thoughts and feelings. Flexibility is needed to change one’s thinking and feeling. Optimism can help to let go of the past and have satisfaction with your life in general. 12. Letting your radar distract you Self-regard, independence, and reality testing Self-regard is needed to trust and respect one’s thoughts and feelings, independence and reality testing is needed to be able to filter out unhelpful distractions and not let what others say impact you too much.

Coaching With Emotional Intelligence

A Coach According to Daniel Goleman, “a coach can frame gaps between self and other ratings as “news to use,” guiding the client to identify her desired areas for growth. Ideally, a coach can help clients cultivate competencies that align with their goals. A coach can help a client cultivate self-awareness to recognize their emotions, habits, and triggers. When a coach notices a negative pattern in a client’s perceptions and actions, a coach can bring it to their client’s attention to help them understand where they’re getting stuck. A coach can ask powerful questions to help the client to reframe their perspective, create new learning, and help the client to develop a plan for change and accountability.

By starting with emotional self-awareness, which is the foundation of emotional intelligence, clients can learn to recognize their emotional triggers and limitations. The coach’s ability to help clients discover or rediscover their purpose and values is important to staying motivated for growth. A coach’s ability to listen attentively, offer objective, yet highly tailored feedback and support can make a difference in creating lasting change for the client.”8

Results

Given all the changes and demands on women in a post-pandemic world, there is a greater need for women to have higher levels of emotional intelligence to navigate so the many changes in their personal and work lives. A woman who works with an effective coach may hold the key to helping her reach her personal and professional goals, and lead a more fulfilled life.

References

What the Pandemic Means for Women in Leadership, Corbett, Holley, Forbes

How Emotional Intelligence is the Secret Tool for Women to Succeed as Leaders/, Cribb, Rachel, Thrive Global article

The Massive Benefits of Boosting Your Emotional Intelligence, Bradberry, Travis, TalentSmart, World Economic Forum

MHS website: https://storefront.mhs.com/collections/eq-i-2-0

Stein, Steven, Ph.D. and Book, Howard E., MD, “The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success”, Josey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, Ontario Canada

MHS website: https://storefront.mhs.com/collections/eq-360

Helgesen, Sally and Goldsmith, Marshall, “How Women Rise, Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion or Job”, Hachette Books, New York, and Boston

How a Coach Works with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, International Coaching Federation (ICF) Blog

Original source: https://coachcampus.com/coach-portfolios/research-papers/coaching-with-emotional-intelligence/

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reportingfordigitalmedia · 5 years ago

Text

Task 2 Reporting for digital media idea generation and research

Task 2 Idea Generation: Kathryn Morrison and Daniel Tihn

The question: How is COVID-19 changing daily life?

IDEA 1: Interviewing media companies for an insight in Coronavirus’ effect in the creative sector.

Since our course is Creative Media Production, it would be interesting to discuss how media companies are dealing with the current situation. We could find local companies like Maka Visuals, TVM, Lovin Malta or FreeHour. Additionally, we could ask foreign companies if they would be willing to provide a statement or sit for an interview. This way we would hit all demographics but also every facet: news, entertainment and informational pieces.

Some questions to ask potential interviewees:

Has it impacted creativity negatively or positively? Would projects be postponed, or would an alternative solution be found to keep clients happy? What problems would it pose for future projects? How would the company move forward to maintain momentum?

IDEA 2: How are teachers and students coping with the current situation? An insight into the current educational change.

We would interview teachers and students both locally and abroad with a series of questions designed to be applicable for all, as the situation hits close to home and therefore everyone has an opinion.

We can interview two areas of life: primary and secondary teachers, as well as students from sixth form, primary, and secondary. If possible, a foreign teacher or students from different countries would be beneficial for an insight into how coronavirus is affecting the rest of the world.

Education is a vital building block for society, an essential, which renders these questions important and relevant for all those who watch the feature.

Perhaps getting rid of the typical ‘question and answer’ format, when it comes to those, we can interview who live in our household: we could have parts of the video with the interviewer and interviewee to be across a long table. This way, the visual presence of social distancing is upheld as it permeates into the essence of the video: how can education move forward in this situation? It is the question on everyone’s mind.

Idea Justification

After discussing it as a team, Daniel and I (Kathryn) have come to the conclusion of doing a news report following the struggles teachers and students are having at continuing their teaching/education. This decision was not made out of whim yet have a few justifiable reasons.

Firstly, as students, this topic is near and dear to us as not only do we find the theme interesting, but we are living through it as we speak. This news feature will not only tell a story, but it will indirectly tell our story as students and the struggles that have been thrown at us. Secondly, this feature will tick a few boxes when it comes to CINNPUT: the story shows conflict between the students, the teachers, the system, and the situation; will hopefully shed some new light on the current situation; centres around Malta and the troubles happening here; and now is the time to write and film pieces centred around COVID-19.

Finally, a major point that helped us choose this topic is that we, as a team, personally know many teachers and students which enables us to perform first-hand research without the use of online conferences and, when it comes to Task 3, the interview can be done face to face. By knowing these teachers of different levels (including a headmaster and an English teacher who lives in America which can bring some foreign context), we will be able to have multiple sources from which to quote and gain knowledge from a multitude of angles. Even when it comes to the gathering of photographs and b-roll, it may be possible to capture some ourselves instead of finding all our sources digitally (with the proper consents in place).

Article Research

Below is a list of articles we examined as a team and used to construct our idea, the flow of our writing, and the pacing of the story. They also helped inform us on what to include vs exclude in our story. With that said, most of our research will be first hand through interviews.

· https://www.bbc.com/news/education-52145351

· https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/apr/06/education-ministers-to-discuss-how-to-ensure-year-12-students-finish-school-this-year-coronavirus

· https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/mar/20/what-should-uk-students-do-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak

· https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/05/us/us-coronavirus-teachers-school-closures/index.html

· https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2020/03/28/conoravirus-kentucky-school-closures-stop-usual-student-teaching/2906646001/

· https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/26/how-coronavirus-changed-college-for-over-14-million-students.html

· https://www.quebec.ca/en/health/health-issues/a-z/2019-coronavirus/stress-anxiety-and-depression-associated-with-the-coronavirus-covid-19-disease/

Article Medium

Before writing an article, a publishing medium first needs to be chosen. Where a piece will be viewed changes the style of writing, language, format, and content drastically as each medium has its own audiences. For our piece, we chose Facebook.

As a social media platform, Facebook has the farthest outreach as a lot of people from all demo- and psychographics use it on a daily basis. When compared to other social media platforms (such as Instagram), there are more users to target and hit with content on Facebook than anywhere else. When it comes to the actual targeting of the content, Facebook’s algorithm for sponsored posts and how it reaches new audiences is very efficient and easy to track those statistics. Although we will not be posting the article and sponsoring it, we are very familiar with Facebook’s system and the business side of the website, making it an obvious choice for us as a team.

Facebook’s wide net is a major advantage for our piece as we are targeting multiple audiences across multiple ages and interests, making the platform perfect.

Writing for Facebook changes the content of the piece, especially when it comes to the flow. When writing for a newspaper, one needs to more informative and direct whereas Facebook is a post, meaning the writing leans towards a style that flows from one paragraph to another. The register of the piece is also affected by the medium, with ours going to lean towards a more casual approach than references us (the writers) and the audience (this feels natural as social media is based on interactions between individuals instead of a third person writing style).

Most Facebook posts have some form of visual media accompanying the post (photos or videos). For our post, we will include an image to accompany the writing (although the text is the main focus), but if this piece were to be released in conjunction with the video in task 3, then they would be released together with the video at the bottom of the article.

Generally, posts on social media platforms would include hashtags to help spread the piece around but since Facebook has its own sponsoring system and algorithm, we wouldn’t include any hashtags. By being able to target the interests of our audience, we wouldn’t need to use hashtags which have the possibility of making the article look ‘tacky’ (the same effect applies to emojis).

Meeting: 2nd April

BASE IDEA: To Interview multiple teachers and students of different levels to see what the situation is at their schools and how they are continuing their education

Students Levels:

2 x Primary (1 going to secondary)

2 x1 Secondary

2 x 6th Form

Bala Uni/MCAST students

Teachers Levels

1 Kindergarden

1 Primary

1 Secondary

2 x Headmistresses (maybe)

1 Foreign English Teacher (Austin)

What do we need?

for task 2: the criteria:

Identify topical concept - (maybe) In our essay we can justify why our topic is topical in a mini intro?, this could accompany our identification of the type we're writing (so either informative, or educational or else entertainment).

identify medium and method of presentation for news report

prepare digital media report for implementation showing evidence of process used

produce an authentic written news report showing evidence of authenticity

Checklist

◦ DOCUMENT: justifying why we chose the topic, the type, the idea-generation

◦ RESEARCH A NEWS STORY: something similar to the topic and following the same field

◦ WRITE THE NEWS STORY

◦ RESEARCH: websites used, references, interview subjects and the medium, transcript of the interview

◦ PLAN INTERVIEWS AND LOCATIONS

Final list of Questions

1. How is the school handling this ‘home schooling’ situation?

a. This is to get a general overview on how the school is enabling students to continue their studies and lecturers/teachers to remain in contact with their class/es

2. What possible benefits have you encountered from online classes? Whilst completely different from the norm, how can online learning change education for the better in these trying times? And what about the disadvantages?

a. When it comes to education, how has the teaching/learning process been affected? Has the quality gone down when it comes to lessons and lectures? Has being at home helped your studies/workload?

3. How are you as a teacher/student coping with this new stress? What are you doing to combat the cabin fever? How is the school helping teachers/students handle this newfound stress?

a. For example, how are teachers reaching out to students and being more accommodating when it comes to assignments and exams?

4. Apart from online lectures, how are you ensuring that your teaching/studying is still kept up to standard? Are you sending/receiving any supplementary material outside of these digital classes? What do you think about that?

N.B. When the same point has multiple questions, these wouldn’t be asked at the same time but instead would be used to either clarify the main question or to help the interviewee answer.

Final list of questions - students

1. How is the school handling this ‘home schooling’ situation?

2. Whilst completely different from the norm, how can online learning change education for the better in these trying times?

3. How are you as a student coping with this new stress? What are you doing to combat the cabin fever?

4. Apart from online lectures, how are you ensuring that your studying is still kept up to standard? Are you receiving any supplementary material outside of these digital classes?

Final list of questions - teachers

1. How is the school handling this ‘home schooling’ situation?

2. Whilst completely different from the norm, how can online learning change education for the better in these trying times?

3. How are you as a teacher coping with this new stress? What are you doing to combat the cabin fever?

4. Apart from online lectures, how are you ensuring that your teaching is still kept up to standard? Are you sending any supplementary material outside of these digital classes?

People Asked

· James Morrison (Form 4 student, going on form 5 in September; attends St. Michael)

· Alice Morrison (Year 6 student, going on form 1 in September; attends St.George Preca Paola Primary B)

o Alice is in year 6, therefore their syllabus was finished before the pandemic. Regardless of whether or not it happened, all they would have done in class would have been revision, therefore no online lessons are happening.

· Ruth Morrison (Secondary School teacher; teaches at St. Thomas More)

· Elisa Gatt (Bachelor of Commerce, 1st Year)

· Faye Darmanin (B. Psy., 1st Year)

· Lexi Manduca (B. A. in European Studies and International Relations, 1st Year)

· Carla Camilleri (B. Sci. in Applied Food and Nutritional Sciences, 1st Year)

· Alexandra Tihn (Form 2; attends Our Lady Immaculate)

· Hannah Gatt (B. Sci. in Communication Therapy, 1st Year)

· Gillian Darmanin (Primary School Teacher; teaches at Chiswick House School)

- Sean Bacica (B.A in Creative Media Production, 2nd Year)

Answers:

James Morrison’s answers (Form 4 student, going on form 5 in September)

1. I wake up at around 10 o’clock, later than normal, I have breakfast and then my mother makes me study or do homework, which I am reluctant to do as there is no motivation at all to study for exams which I have to sit for after this period. I am handling it badly, as this situation feels more like a holiday rather than school. Due to that, I just want to play on my phone or play video games all day as I would when on holiday.

2. I have only had a few online classes, as the majority of the focus for my year is on online homework. However, for the few times I did have online classes (at the beginning) made me realise that I prefer it. Online learning has the advantage of being more flexible, which for people my age is a benefit as we don’t like being told what to do. So, having the ability to pick the time and place of our work is a plus. I feel more comfortable using technology as it is more hands-on rather than just listening to the teacher, I can take notes at my own pace and I can pay attention better from the comfort of my own home.

3. Ultimately, I miss my friends and playing football with my club, as well as seeing my grandparents as I go and stay with them every weekend. At the moment, I am trying my best to adapt my activities of before the quarantine to online activities. For example, my catechism group are meeting online, and my family and I are getting takeout every Saturday so we can have a ‘’get together’’ and talk about how we’re handling the situation, it cheers me up a lot. Luckily, we have a garden and I can practice football and exercise outside which is super important to me as football keeps me sane.

4. I have been using the foreign language app Duolingo to keep practicing my German. At home, my mum sits with me and helps me study as next year I will be in form 5, so right now it is important that my grades do not slip. I am also receiving worksheets which we have to print, work out and send a picture for some lessons, others have no given us anything. Other teachers are putting videos up on youtube of lessons which we have to watch, and then fill out a form afterwards to make sure we understood the material.

Alice Morrison’s answers (Year 6 student, going on form 1 in September)

N.B Alice is in year 6, therefore their syllabus was finished before the pandemic. Regardless of whether or not it happened, all they would have done in class would have been revision, therefore no online lessons are happening.

1.I am handling it well, Home-schooling works for me because since I am at home, my mum walks me through my revision slowly and therefore I have more attention and help rather than everything being fast due to having to finish the syllabus in time. Also, I am happy about not having benchmarks because it removes the pressure I had before.

2. Online learning is more fun in my opinion because since it is all online, there is the possibility of sharing maths games for example or videos which personally keep me interested and help me learn better. A big one is that I feel less pressure working from home, in the classroom it is harder to keep up and I feel like online learning gives me more room to learn from my mistakes.

3. I am coping well, I feel great because I feel like I am introvert. This does not feel stressful to me, I feel much more relaxed when I am at home in comparison with when I was physically at school. I feel stressed and sad when I think of how I have not seen my grandparents in a long time, so I have been phoning them for often. Sometimes I feel a bit lonely, but I keep in contact with my friends from school by video-chatting them and also make new friends online.

4. I have had no online lessons as my syllabus has been long finished. My mum gives me revision exercises to do every day as extra work, as well as makes me read in English and Maltese to go hand in hand with the worksheets I receive from my teachers. The downside is that without being in class, I have to wait longer for my teachers to correct my homework which makes the learning process a bit slower. We also have quizzes on our school tablet which actually motivated me and kept me feeling like I want to learn because it was competitive.

Ruth Morrison’s answers (Secondary School teacher)

1. We were given to go ahead to do what we deem fit for the sake of our students; we can either do online lessons, send worksheets or find other methods depending on the subject. Some of my colleagues sent emails, used the state school platform ‘’My School’’ to post homework or video links, but we were given the email addresses of all the students in case we preferred to contact them directly individually. On the end of the school’s assistance, we were given webinars teaching us how to use Microsoft Teams so that all staff members are acquainted with the software needed. SMS’s were sent to the parents to encourage student participation and to make sure everyone is aware of the resources. However, not every student is participating. The student participation is actually really low, which is concerning for us teachers. The students who previously did not put much effort into working have diminished incredibly in regard to their effort now, but the students who showed interest are maintaining this.

2. It can be used as tool for the better for integration of internet resources such as videos which students seem to like and keeps the students who are visuals learners to pay attention and review for better understanding. It could be useful for revision for the most part, but then we have to be careful as online learning removes the barrier and leads to lack of routine or ‘’boundaries’’ as some students do not pay attention to school hours and expect responses instantly. I feel the majority of the benefits are for primary students as it allows the parent to be present for the learning experience, but for secondary school students the benefits lie only for note-taking (as some teachers speak quickly and students need to write everything down) or for reviewing purposes. Games, videos, learning websites with music and graphics are all great for the modern student as it is more engaging to many in comparison to reading from books. We show all these things in class, but with online learning everything is able to be reviewed again and again. Ultimately, I feel online learning should be used in conjunction with real-life learning rather than instead of, as everything is better when balanced.

3. The webinar about how to use Microsoft teams and watching many youtube videos of how to use the software given to us did alleviate a lot of the stress I had, as well as teaming up with my colleagues, keeping in contact and sharing information regarding what we can do to move forward is a great help. I post notes, worksheets, video links, everything I can to provide the same experience, but the response from students is not massive, but since I send answer sheets as well that may be because they are marking their work themselves in adherence to the sheet I sent. Communicating with my colleagues and opening up to them helps me with the cabin fever situation, we help each other and offer support with technical problems or general issues. We send funny videos and ‘’memes’’ to cheer each other up as well. I am revising my German, as before I did not have time to brush up my skills and now I can; it keeps my mind engaged. I am basically doing everything I had no time to do before, such as decluttering.

Ironically, I am home schooling my children which feels great as I love teaching and it comes second nature to me, but it is hard when they do not want to work due to the demotivation effects of the quarantine.

4. I teach geography, and all us geography teachers created a specific ‘’team’’ for conversation with each other and keeping up the standard of the geography lesson, but I have not given any online lessons as it is not necessary for my situation. Since geography is not a main subject, I am aware of the fact that I may not have the same pressure as a maths or English teacher for example, as in school I would only see them once a week. I am therefore doing the best I can by sending extra videos, notes and anything interesting I feel would benefit them. I am also open for emails and respond to questions outside digital classes. I have found myself in the position of resending old notes as many students had left their notes in their lockers at the time of the school closure, as well as textbooks, therefore I simplified some notes as well due to them not having a textbook explanation.

Sean Bacica's answers (MCAST ICA 2nd Year student)

1. I am taking it day to day, planning out assignments as they come along and follow the instructions from my lecturers about how to proceed

2. Most of the lectures I am having during these times are 1 on 1, so the increase in personal attention helps with the progress of more challenging tasks

3. I feel I am coping quite fine with the stress, virtually meeting with lecturers and fellow peers often helps! When I feel trapped inside, I try to take a short drive or take my dog out for a short walk especially since the weather is so nice

4. Generally it is just online lectures that are keeping me and most of my peers in line with our goals and standards. External notes that wouldn't normally be supplied are being supplied which helps us to study when we aren't in said lectures

Elisa Gatt (Uni student):

1. Depends on the lecturer of the particular module rather than the school.

Out of 9 modules

- 2 do online lectures

- 1 does online lectures and also sends us the recording

- 4 send us recorded lectures

- 1 sends us a set of notes with corresponding voice recordings

- and another hasn’t sent us anything

I don’t mind the recorded lectures, however depends on the quality of teaching, some just send us a recording of them reading a power point which is quite useless.

However, I prefer recorded lectures over live lectures as one can pause to take notes, and listen to them in their own time.

The handout and voice recording lecture really fit the subject (statistics) well also.

Personally, I’m managing to cope with the lectures, however the main problem for me is exams. There is a deadline for the 17th for them to tell us what is happening with exams for the respective modules. However I feel like knowing if the exam will be assessment or assignment based will help to actually start studying.

2. It allows students to work in their own time. However this can also be a bad thing for students who aren’t very good with time management and organization.

3. Surprisingly doing well. I’ve been going up to my brothers office on weekday mornings to do work, so I can split my uni life and home life. And on weekends I don’t do anything school related.

This has really helped as I’m not spending 24/7 on my desk at home and I’m wasting less time.

4. Some send us power point presentations, while others recommend reading chapters of certain textbooks.

However one lecturer based his entire module on a textbook which isn’t being printed anymore, and can’t be found online. And doesn’t send us any power points, expecting us to take our notes from this book which can’t be found anywhere. Especially with the current situation.

For my statistics lecture we have a set of notes, and also a set of tutorial sheets to ensure we all understand.

Faye Darmanin (Uni Student, part time):

1. Quite well; I have online lectures for both of my units, and each of them upload the PowerPoints of the topic right after the online lecture ends.

The only issue I have is that the university is taking too long to tell us what the situation is for exams, not allowing us enough time to prepare.

2. This gives students more time with studying and note-taking.

3. I’m not doing anything to combat it, as since I only have 2 units the stress of school is quite low.

4. We are receiving the uploaded PowerPoints of each topic, but they are uploaded during normal face-to-face lectures as well, so nothing extra is being sent.

Lexi Manduca (Uni Student):

1. Quite well; I have online lectures for both of my units, and each of them upload the PowerPoints of the topic right after the online lecture ends.The only issue I have is that the university is taking too long to tell us what the situation is for exams, not allowing us enough time to prepare.2. This gives students more time with studying and note-taking.3. I’m not doing anything to combat it, as since I only have 2 units the stress of school is quite low.4. We are receiving the uploaded PowerPoints of each topic, but they are uploaded during normal face-to-face lectures as well, so nothing extra is being sent.

1. Most give us online live lectures on zoom. Some send us pre-recorded ones. Some lecturers just send us the power points and readings which is not at all an ideal way to learn.

2. It could encourage lecturers to record the lectures and upload them after the lecture so that students can go back and re-listen to anything they might not have understood during the lesson. This might encourage students to miss lectures so stricter attendance would need to be applied to combat this.

3. Recently I've found the best way to tackle being home all day is to spend as much time as I can out in the sun (in the balcony not actually out of the hosue).

4. We do receive the occasional podcast/ additional readings but mostly I'm keeping up with my studies through researching for and carrying out assignments

Carla Camilleri (Uni Student):

1. We’ve resorted to online lectures via Google Meet or Zoom. My faculty was pretty efficient with regards to continuing with lectures as normal however have barely given us any feedback with regards to what will be happening for exams.

2. Online learning can offer different ways of interaction between the lecturer and students as well as between the students themselves which wouldn’t normally be explored in a normal classroom such as through Groupwork on Google Docs or using videos on a more regular basis to initiate discussions. Online learning also makes learning more flexible and customizable. Lectures are generally recorded so can be accessed later on as a method of revision, if one needs clarification on a subject matter or can’t join the lecture in real time. The workspace can be altered by the student as desired to fit their mode of learning and comfort.

3. I’m making sure to attend all my lectures in real time as well as catching up on class notes to make sure i do not fall behind on work. I’m also making sure to communicate as much as possible with my lecturers to remain up to date on the exam and assignment situations for my units. Balancing learning with my hobbies also helps to combat stress, turning my focus away from continuous learning allows my brain to reset and relax.

4. Our lecturers have provided us with all the powerpoints of their lectures. They’ve also provided us with books for further reading and videos which help in providing a better understanding of the topics being covered. This all makes studying easier as we’re given multiple sources for making notes which are referred to when exam season begins.

Alexandra Tihn (Form 2)

1. My school is handling the home-schooling situation by sending me homework and assignments every day while I'm away from school, I dont have online classes but I still have papers and work. It's hard to keep up on everything that the school sends us since they send us a lot at once it gets really confusing for me, but it isn't that bad since I made a schedule.

2. I think it’s a good way to do work while I'm away from school, but I don't think it's the best thing we could do while we are away since they send us double the work and it's getting really hectic.

3. I’m coping with all the work but the stress comes along with it straight away, having to see where I can get things printed or seeing when the deadline is since it's all messy and wondering if what I'm doing is correct without an actual explanation from the teachers. I think I'm handling staying inside really well, especially since we have technology now which allows me to communicate with my friends so I don't feel totally alone, although it does make me feel very lonely at time when I just want someone to talk to or to hug etc.

4. Well given the fact that I don't have lectures the only way I can know if I'm keeping up with the standard of studying is by doing as much of the work I can as possible before they leave the school website because of deadlines. The teachers sometimes sends me and everyone as a whole class some papers with notes and some power points but it's hard to keep up since sometimes they send us work and then the next day send us the answers so I don't really have time to do the work sometimes.

Hannah Gatt (Uni Student):

1. Under these circumstances I think the school is doing all it can to aid its students in any way they can. This being said, some lecturers are clearly putting in more effort than others however overall, the university seems to be helping students adjust to home schooling very well. My only issue at this point in time is regarding the examination period and having no idea what is going to happen. Out of the 11 study units I have, I only know for certain how 3 of them are going to be assessed whilst the others are keeping us in the dark which is extremely unfair.

2. I think online learning has proven the importance and value of face to face interactions with teachers and lecturers that simply cannot be replaced. However it has also shown that regardless of the circumstances, there is always a method through which education can take place which is important for everyone to keep in mind.

3. To be completely honest I am growing slightly restless as I miss interacting and socialising with people. However, im trying not to get too overwhelmed with the situation since I know that everyone is in the same predicament. I’m personally trying to keep myself busy mainly by working on assignments but I also try to pass time by reading, playing playstation ect…

4. Some lecturers are being extremely helpful and giving us extra material in order for us to understand better yet at the same time some lecturers aren’t taking into account how stressful this situation is for us and won’t even answer our emails regarding queries on our work/assignments. Besides all this I feel it is up to us students to not get lazy and continue working by ourselves for online lectures are not enough to help us to get through our end of year assessments.

Gillian Darmanin (Primary school teacher)

1. The school I am currently employed with has primarily followed & complied all instructions issued by the government regarding the closure of the school. The school head and assistants have communicated with parents via email on how they were planning to assist their pupils. They in turn through consultation & collaboration with all level leaders and all teachers implemented an instruction strategy for the current situation.

2. In online learning the social interaction with the pupils is quite limited. However, having said that more and more sites have made their resources free for parents and teachers. Many have also included a section called ‘home learning’ providing videos with clear explanations as well as worksheets and answers in an attempt to provide clear instruction on the topic at hand.

3. I am communicating & collaborating regularly with other teachers through Microsoft teams and through phone calls. Trying to keep a regular routine every day and regular yoga!

4. Even though I teach in primary school, the senior leaders have taken the decision that for online teaching each teacher in a level will be subject teaching. Also, teachers have been paired up to work on lesson preparation as a team. Focusing on a particular subject helps to hone your skills in a particular area.

Supplementary material like worksheets & online libraries have been set up to encourage further consolidation of topics learnt. Also encouraging pupils to record themselves giving presentations and or reading so continuous assessment can be continued in this unprecedented situation.

N.B. Those without screenshots were asked verbally and then the answers were transcribed.

Video Format

Video Flow:

The video starts with the interviewer opening with a short monologue, describing the current situation and introducing the topic at hand (situation with students and teachers). This will lead into a series of audio clips from students from different institutes and levels of learning, each answering the same question but always adding something to the story (a new perspective).

Back to the interviewer explaining some of the students’ opinions on how the future will present itself. Then cut to more snippets of audio from the students about how they think the future will pan out (this would concern how they feel and how they think this will be resolved. We will not be writing the script for the interviewer’s sections until after the interviews themselves so we have all the information nat hand before committing ourselves.

The music should be on the mellow side while also having poppy undertones. This would be able to create a relaxing tone to the piece while also giving it a vibe appealing to a bit of a younger demographic.

The video (and article) will target a wide audience as it will not specifically be aimed at any particular demographic yet will be targeted to those who have an interest in education, the current situation, and schooling. It will also attract a general audience as it will inform the average reader on the happenings of students.

Video Locations/Footage:

· People’s homes via webcam.

· Footage found online (below are examples and resources)

· B-roll shot by Kathryn and Daniel (For example: students entertaining themselves, a lecturer teaching a lesson [without showing students], screen recording of online class)

Audio:

· https://www.epidemicsound.com/

o We have an account

Online Assets/Footage:

· https://www.youtube.com/embed/hIkCmbvAHQQ?rel=0&autoplay=1&cc_load_policy=1

· https://www.pexels.com/search/videos/students/

· https://www.pexels.com/search/videos/online%20work/

· https://www.pexels.com/search/videos/at%20home/

· https://pixabay.com/videos/search/students/

· https://pixabay.com/videos/search/online/

· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7euX2P-Mwk

· https://www.videezy.com/people/37310-businesswoman-checking-product-on-stock-online

· https://www.pexels.com/video/woman-having-a-video-call-4053047/

· https://www.pexels.com/video/busy-woman-working-with-her-laptop-and-smartphone-3251808/

· https://www.pexels.com/video/a-disappointed-woman-keeping-herself-busy-3709513/

TASK 2 ARTICLE (also in separate blog post)

Education in a pandemic: lack of a routine.

According to Prof. Charmaine Gauci, Malta is yet to reach it’s peak. This simple statement speaks volumes of what can be expected in not only our future as a country, but what world we will be living in through the coming months. Businesses may go bankrupt, unemployment will be on the rise, global health might take a hit as many are forced to stay indoors, and the dawn of a new recession is right around the corner. However, what about those who, in an age of technology and social media, live in the online space?

Although most students would love more free time to binge watch Netflix, the reality is that many are struggling with the new change. As lectures move to virtual platforms, life becomes a nightmare with assignments, and exams being shuffled around, with the due dates changing constantly. No one could have truly prepared for an event like this, but due to the rapid change many are beginning to feel left behind.

When confronted with the urgency of shutting down schools, actions had to be taken quickly. By prioritising the immediacy of the decisions over the consistency between them, many issues are going unsolved. When asked about how the University of Malta is handling online communication and teaching, 1st year student Elisa Gatt had this to say:

“[It] depends on the lecturer of the particular module rather than the school. Out of 9 modules: 2 do online lectures; 1 does online lectures and also sends us the recording; 4 send us recorded lectures, 1 sends us a set of notes with corresponding voice recordings; and another hasn’t sent us anything.”

Explaining the current situation in a simplified manner is confusing in itself, let alone basing one’s future education around the convolution. Many students are having to juggle this new system whilst also getting to grips with reality themselves. Even when it comes to the simple things such as video platforms, some lecturers prefer to use Zoom where others opt for Microsoft Teams or Google Meet. Having to jump from one to another between back to back lectures, all on different spaces is not only inefficient but is making it that much harder for students to find some breathing room.

It isn’t only University students struggling with the new system. Secondary school students are finding it difficult to keep up with the new workload while also finding ways to keep their sanity. A student who is currently in Form 2 was asked how they are handling this newfound stress, and simply replied that they are not. Due to a lack of online lessons, they spoke about the self-doubt that accompanies their work without proper guidance and the problems at having to organise everything and schedule their work.

The ‘blame’ cannot be pinned onto one party, as schools are trying their best to keep their students informed and on the right track. Meanwhile, teachers are trying their best to cope with the changes in tandem while also doing extra work for the sake of helping their students. With everyone struggling to regain normality, the only way forward is for all of us to support one another, to keep ourselves informed, and to focus on making it to the other side.

0 notes

blackkudos · 8 years ago

Text

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr., January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs.

King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia (the Albany Movement), and helped organize the 1963 nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history.

On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year he and SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam".

In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities.

King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington State was also renamed for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

Early life and education

King was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. (1899–1984) and Alberta Williams King (1904–1974). King's legal name at birth was Michael King, and his father was also born Michael King, but the elder King changed his and his son's names following a 1934 trip to Germany to attend the Fifth Baptist World Alliance Congress in Berlin. It was during this time he chose to be called Martin Luther King in honor of the German reformer Martin Luther. King had Irish ancestry through his paternal great-grandfather, as well as African ancestry.

King was a middle child, between an older sister, Willie Christine King, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King. King sang with his church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie Gone with the Wind. King liked singing and music. His mother was an accomplished organist and choir leader, and she took him to various churches to sing. He received attention for singing "I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus." King later became a member of the junior choir in his church.

King said that his father regularly whipped him until he was fifteen; a neighbor reported hearing the elder King telling his son "he would make something of him even if he had to beat him to death." King saw his father's proud and fearless protests against segregation, such as King Sr. refusing to listen to a traffic policeman after being referred to as "boy," or stalking out of a store with his son when being told by a shoe clerk that they would have to "move to the rear" of the store to be served.

When King was a child, he befriended a white boy whose father owned a business near his family's home. When the boys were six, they started school: King had to attend a school for African Americans and the other boy went to one for whites (public schools were among the facilities segregated by state law). King lost his friend because the child's father no longer wanted the boys to play together.

King suffered from depression throughout much of his life. In his adolescent years, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the "racial humiliation" that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure in the segregated South. At the age of 12, shortly after his maternal grandmother died, King blamed himself and jumped out of a second-story window, but survived.

King was skeptical of many of Christianity's claims. At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school. From this point, he stated, "doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly". However, he later concluded that the Bible has "many profound truths which one cannot escape" and decided to enter the seminary.

Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. He became known for his public speaking ability and was part of the school's debate team. King became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal in 1942 when he was 13. During his junior year, he won first prize in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks Club in Dublin, Georgia. Returning home to Atlanta by bus, he and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so that white passengers could sit down. King initially refused, but complied after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did not submit. King said that during this incident, he was "the angriest I have ever been in my life". A precocious student, he skipped both the ninth and the twelfth grades of high school.

During King's junior year in high school, Morehouse College, a respected historically black college, announced that it would accept any high school juniors who could pass its entrance exam. At that time, many students had abandoned further studies to enlist in World War II. Due to this, Morehouse was eager to fill its classrooms. At the age of 15, King passed the exam and entered Morehouse. The summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, the 18-year-old King chose to enter the ministry. He had concluded that the church offered the most assuring way to answer "an inner urge to serve humanity". King's "inner urge" had begun developing, and he made peace with the Baptist Church, as he believed he would be a "rational" minister with sermons that were "a respectful force for ideas, even social protest."

In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a B.A. degree in sociology and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a B.Div. degree in 1951. King's father fully supported his decision to continue his education.

While attending Crozer, King was joined by Walter McCall, a former classmate at Morehouse. At Crozer, King was elected president of the student body. The African-American students of Crozer for the most part conducted their social activity on Edwards Street. King became fond of the street because a classmate had an aunt who prepared collard greens for them, which they both relished.

King once reproved another student for keeping beer in his room, saying they had shared responsibility as African Americans to bear "the burdens of the Negro race." For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbusch's "social gospel". In his third year at Morehouse, King became romantically involved with the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who worked as a cook in the cafeteria. The daughter had been involved with a professor prior to her relationship with King. King planned to marry her, but friends advised against it, saying that such an interracial marriage would provoke animosity from both blacks and whites, potentially damaging his chances of ever pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he could not endure his mother's pain over the marriage and broke the relationship off six months later. He continued to have lingering feelings toward the women he left; one friend was quoted as saying, "He never recovered."

King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama; he was 24 and she was 26. They became the parents of four children: Yolanda King (b. 1955), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (b. 1961), and Bernice King (b. 1963). During their marriage, King limited Coretta's role in the Civil Rights Movement, expecting her to be a housewife and mother.

At age 25 in 1954, King was called as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Doctoral studies

King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Ph.D. degree on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation on A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. While pursuing doctoral studies, King worked as an assistant minister at Boston's historic Twelfth Baptist Church with Rev. William Hunter Hester. Hester was an old friend of King's father, and was an important influence on King.

Decades later, an academic inquiry in October 1991 concluded that portions of his dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. However, "[d]espite its finding, the committee said that 'no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree,' an action that the panel said would serve no purpose." The committee also found that the dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." A letter is now attached to the copy of King's dissertation held in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.

Montgomery bus boycott, 1955

In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old school girl in Montgomery, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in compliance with Jim Crow laws, local regulations in the Southern United States that enforced racial segregation. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; because Colvin was pregnant and unmarried, E. D. Nixon and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The Montgomery bus boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which concluded with a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform. One of the group's inspirations was the crusades of evangelist Billy Graham, who befriended King after he attended a Graham crusade in New York City in 1957. King led the SCLC until his death. The SCLC's 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was the first time King addressed a national audience. Other civil rights leaders involved in the SCLC with King included: James Bevel, Allen Johnson, Curtis W. Harris, Walter E. Fauntroy, C. T. Vivian, Andrew Young, The Freedom Singers, Charles Evers, Cleveland Robinson, Randolph Blackwell, Annie Bell Robinson Devine, Charles Kenzie Steele, Alfred Daniel Williams King, Benjamin Hooks, Aaron Henry and Bayard Rustin.

On September 20, 1958, while signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein's department store in Harlem, King narrowly escaped death when Izola Curry, a mentally ill black woman who believed he was conspiring against her with communists, stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. After emergency surgery by Aubre de Lambert Maynard, Emil Naclerio and John W. V. Cordice , King was hospitalized for several weeks, while Curry was found mentally incompetent to stand trial. In 1959, he published a short book called The Measure of A Man, which contained his sermons "What is Man?" and "The Dimensions of a Complete Life". The sermons argued for man's need for God's love and criticized the racial injustices of Western civilization.

Harry Wachtel—who joined King's legal advisor Clarence B. Jones in defending four ministers of the SCLC in a libel suit over a newspaper advertisement (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan)—founded a tax-exempt fund to cover the expenses of the suit and to assist the nonviolent civil rights movement through a more effective means of fundraising. This organization was named the "Gandhi Society for Human Rights". King served as honorary president for the group. Displeased with the pace of President Kennedy's addressing the issue of segregation, King and the Gandhi Society produced a document in 1962 calling on the President to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln and use an Executive Order to deliver a blow for Civil Rights as a kind of Second Emancipation Proclamation - Kennedy did not execute the order.

The FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, began tapping King's telephone in the fall of 1963. Concerned that allegations of communists in the SCLC, if made public, would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives, Kennedy warned King to discontinue the suspect associations, and later felt compelled to issue the written directive authorizing the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders. J. Edgar Hoover feared Communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights movement, but when no such evidence emerged, the bureau used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years in attempts to force King out of the preeminent leadership position.

King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the Civil Rights Movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.

King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

King and the SCLC put into practice many of the principles of the Christian Left and applied the tactics of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent.

Throughout his participation in the civil rights movement, King was criticized by many groups. This included opposition by more militant blacks such as Nation of Islam member Malcolm X. Stokely Carmichael was a separatist and disagreed with King's plea for racial integration because he considered it an insult to a uniquely African-American culture. Omali Yeshitela urged Africans to remember the history of violent European colonization and how power was not secured by Europeans through integration, but by violence and force.

Albany Movement

The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. In December, King and the SCLC became involved. The movement mobilized thousands of citizens for a broad-front nonviolent attack on every aspect of segregation within the city and attracted nationwide attention. When King first visited on December 15, 1961, he "had planned to stay a day or so and return home after giving counsel." The following day he was swept up in a mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators, and he declined bail until the city made concessions. According to King, "that agreement was dishonored and violated by the city" after he left town.

King returned in July 1962, and was sentenced to forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine. He chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett discreetly arranged for King's fine to be paid and ordered his release. "We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools ... ejected from churches ... and thrown into jail ... But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail." It was later acknowledged by the King Center that Billy Graham was the one who bailed King out of jail during this time.

After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible results, the movement began to deteriorate. King requested a halt to all demonstrations and a "Day of Penance" to promote nonviolence and maintain the moral high ground. Divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts. Though the Albany effort proved a key lesson in tactics for King and the national civil rights movement, the national media was highly critical of King's role in the defeat, and the SCLC's lack of results contributed to a growing gulf between the organization and the more radical SNCC. After Albany, King sought to choose engagements for the SCLC in which he could control the circumstances, rather than entering into pre-existing situations.

Birmingham campaign

In April 1963, the SCLC began a campaign against racial segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics, developed in part by Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker. Black people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC, occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that they considered unjust.

King's intent was to provoke mass arrests and "create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation". However, the campaign's early volunteers did not succeed in shutting down the city, or in drawing media attention to the police's actions. Over the concerns of an uncertain King, SCLC strategist James Bevel changed the course of the campaign by recruiting children and young adults to join in the demonstrations. Newsweek called this strategy a Children's Crusade.

During the protests, the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, used high-pressure water jets and police dogs against protesters, including children. Footage of the police response was broadcast on national television news and dominated the nation's attention, shocking many white Americans and consolidating black Americans behind the movement. Not all of the demonstrators were peaceful, despite the avowed intentions of the SCLC. In some cases, bystanders attacked the police, who responded with force. King and the SCLC were criticized for putting children in harm's way. But the campaign was a success: Connor lost his job, the "Jim Crow" signs came down, and public places became more open to blacks. King's reputation improved immensely.

King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign—his 13th arrest out of 29. From his cell, he composed the now-famous Letter from Birmingham Jail which responds to calls on the movement to pursue legal channels for social change. King argues that the crisis of racism is too urgent, and the current system too entrenched: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." He points out that the Boston Tea Party, a celebrated act of rebellion in the American colonies, was illegal civil disobedience, and that, conversely, "everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal'". King also expresses his frustration with white moderates and clergymen too timid to oppose an unjust system:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistic-ally believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season".

St. Augustine, Florida

In March 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with Robert Hayling's then-controversial movement in St. Augustine, Florida. Hayling's group had been affiliated with the NAACP but was forced out of the organization for advocating armed self-defense alongside nonviolent tactics. Ironically, the pacifist SCLC accepted them. King and the SCLC worked to bring white Northern activists to St. Augustine, including a delegation of rabbis and the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, all of whom were arrested. During June, the movement marched nightly through the city, "often facing counter demonstrations by the Klan, and provoking violence that garnered national media attention." Hundreds of the marchers were arrested and jailed. During the course of this movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.

Selma, Alabama

In December 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, where the SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months. A local judge issued an injunction that barred any gathering of 3 or more people affiliated with the SNCC, SCLC, DCVL, or any of 41 named civil rights leaders. This injunction temporarily halted civil rights activity until King defied it by speaking at Brown Chapel on January 2, 1965.

New York City

On February 6, 1964, King delivered the inaugural speech of a lecture series initiated at the New School called "The American Race Crisis". No audio record of his speech has been found, but in August 2013, almost 50 years later, the school discovered an audiotape with 15 minutes of a question-and-answer session that followed King's address. In these remarks, King referred to a conversation he had recently had with Jawaharlal Nehru in which he compared the sad condition of many African Americans to that of India's untouchables.

March on Washington, 1963

King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were Roy Wilkins from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young, National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James L. Farmer Jr., of the Congress of Racial Equality.

The primary logistical and strategic organizer was King's colleague Bayard Rustin. For King, this role was another which courted controversy, since he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of United States President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation. However, the organizers were firm that the march would proceed. With the march going forward, the Kennedys decided it was important to work to ensure its success. President Kennedy was concerned the turnout would be less than 100,000. Therefore, he enlisted the aid of additional church leaders and the UAW union to help mobilize demonstrators for the cause.

The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the southern U.S. and an opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Organizers intended to denounce the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks. However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone. As a result, some civil rights activists felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X called it the "Farce on Washington", and the Nation of Islam forbade its members from attending the march.

The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public schools; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee. Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.'s history.

King delivered a 17-minute speech, later known as "I Have a Dream". In the speech's most famous passage—in which he departed from his prepared text, possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted behind him, "Tell them about the dream!"—King said:

"I Have a Dream" came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the agenda of reformers in the United States and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The original typewritten copy of the speech, including King's handwritten notes on it, was discovered in 1984 to be in the hands of George Raveling, the first African-American basketball coach of the University of Iowa. In 1963, Raveling, then 26, was standing near the podium, and immediately after the oration, impulsively asked King if he could have his copy of the speech. He got it.

Selma voting rights movement and "Bloody Sunday", 1965

Acting on James Bevel's call for a march from Selma to Montgomery, King, Bevel, and the SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, attempted to organize the march to the state's capital. The first attempt to march on March 7, 1965, was aborted because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day has become known as Bloody Sunday and was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement. It was the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. King, however, was not present.

King met with officials in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration on March 5 in order to request an injunction against any prosecution of the demonstrators. He did not attend the march due to church duties, but he later wrote, "If I had any idea that the state troopers would use the kind of brutality they did, I would have felt compelled to give up my church duties altogether to lead the line." Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused national public outrage.

King next attempted to organize a march for March 9. The SCLC petitioned for an injunction in federal court against the State of Alabama; this was denied and the judge issued an order blocking the march until after a hearing. Nonetheless, King led marchers on March 9 to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, then held a short prayer session before turning the marchers around and asking them to disperse so as not to violate the court order. The unexpected ending of this second march aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, 1965. At the conclusion of the march on the steps of the state capitol, King delivered a speech that became known as "How Long, Not Long". In it, King stated that equal rights for African Americans could not be far away, "because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice".

Chicago open housing movement, 1966

In 1966, after several successes in the south, King, Bevel, and others in the civil rights organizations tried to spread the movement to the North, with Chicago as their first destination. King and Ralph Abernathy, both from the middle class, moved into a building at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave., in the slums of North Lawndale on Chicago's West Side, as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor.

The SCLC formed a coalition with CCCO, Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an organization founded by Albert Raby, and the combined organizations' efforts were fostered under the aegis of the Chicago Freedom Movement. During that spring, several white couple / black couple tests of real estate offices uncovered racial steering: discriminatory processing of housing requests by couples who were exact matches in income, background, number of children, and other attributes. Several larger marches were planned and executed: in Bogan, Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park, Evergreen Park (a suburb southwest of Chicago), Gage Park, Marquette Park, and others.

Abernathy later wrote that the movement received a worse reception in Chicago than in the South. Marches, especially the one through Marquette Park on August 5, 1966, were met by thrown bottles and screaming throngs. Rioting seemed very possible. King's beliefs militated against his staging a violent event, and he negotiated an agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley to cancel a march in order to avoid the violence that he feared would result. King was hit by a brick during one march but continued to lead marches in the face of personal danger.

When King and his allies returned to the South, they left Jesse Jackson, a seminary student who had previously joined the movement in the South, in charge of their organization. Jackson continued their struggle for civil rights by organizing the Operation Breadbasket movement that targeted chain stores that did not deal fairly with blacks.

Opposition to the Vietnam War

King long opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War, but at first avoided the topic in public speeches in order to avoid the interference with civil rights goals that criticism of President Johnson's policies might have created. However, at the urging of SCLC's former Director of Direct Action and now the head of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, James Bevel, King eventually agreed to publicly oppose the war as opposition was growing among the American public. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church—exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence". He spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, arguing that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". He also connected the war with economic injustice, arguing that the country needed serious moral change:

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just."

King also opposed the Vietnam War because it took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare at home. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. He summed up this aspect by saying, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death". He stated that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands", and accused the U.S. of having killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children". King also criticized American opposition to North Vietnam's land reforms.

King's opposition cost him significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, Billy Graham, union leaders and powerful publishers. "The press is being stacked against me", King said, complaining of what he described as a double standard that applauded his nonviolence at home, but deplored it when applied "toward little brown Vietnamese children". Life magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people".

The "Beyond Vietnam" speech reflected King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with which he was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation, and more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In a 1952 letter to Coretta Scott, he said: "I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic ..." In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected "traditional capitalism", he also rejected communism because of its "materialistic interpretation of history" that denied religion, its "ethical relativism", and its "political totalitarianism".

King also stated in "Beyond Vietnam" that "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar ... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring". King quoted a United States official who said that from Vietnam to Latin America, the country was "on the wrong side of a world revolution". King condemned America's "alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America", and said that the U.S. should support "the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution.

On April 15, 1967, King participated in and spoke at an anti-war march from New York's Central Park to the United Nations organized by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and initiated by its chairman, James Bevel. At the U.N. King also brought up issues of civil rights and the draft.

I have not urged a mechanical fusion of the civil rights and peace movements. There are people who have come to see the moral imperative of equality, but who cannot yet see the moral imperative of world brotherhood. I would like to see the fervor of the civil-rights movement imbued into the peace movement to instill it with greater strength. And I believe everyone has a duty to be in both the civil-rights and peace movements. But for those who presently choose but one, I would hope they will finally come to see the moral roots common to both.

Seeing an opportunity to unite civil rights activists and anti-war activists, Bevel convinced King to become even more active in the anti-war effort. Despite his growing public opposition towards the Vietnam War, King was also not fond of the hippie culture which developed from the anti-war movement. In his 1967 Massey Lecture, King stated:

The importance of the hippies is not in their unconventional behavior, but in the fact that hundreds of thousands of young people, in turning to a flight from reality, are expressing a profoundly discrediting view on the society they emerge from.

On January 13, 1968, the day after President Johnson's State of the Union Address, King called for a large march on Washington against "one of history's most cruel and senseless wars".

We need to make clear in this political year, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the president of the United States, that we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killings of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self-determination in Southeast Asia.

Poor People's Campaign, 1968

In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an "economic bill of rights" for poor Americans.

The campaign was preceded by King's final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? which laid out his view of how to address social issues and poverty. King quoted from Henry George and George's book, Progress and Poverty, particularly in support of a guaranteed basic income. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C., demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States.

King and the SCLC called on the government to invest in rebuilding America's cities. He felt that Congress had shown "hostility to the poor" by spending "military funds with alacrity and generosity". He contrasted this with the situation faced by poor Americans, claiming that Congress had merely provided "poverty funds with miserliness". His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of "racism, poverty, militarism and materialism", and argued that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced".

The Poor People's Campaign was controversial even within the civil rights movement. Rustin resigned from the march, stating that the goals of the campaign were too broad, that its demands were unrealizable, and that he thought that these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.

After King's death

The plan to set up a shantytown in Washington, D.C., was carried out soon after the April 4 assassination. Criticism of King's plan was subdued in the wake of his death, and the SCLC received an unprecedented wave of donations for the purpose of carrying it out. The campaign officially began in Memphis, on May 2, at the hotel where King was murdered.

Thousands of demonstrators arrived on the National Mall and established a camp they called "Resurrection City". They stayed for six weeks.

Assassination and aftermath

On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the black sanitary public works employees, represented by AFSCME Local 1733, who had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. In one incident, black street repairmen received pay for two hours when they were sent home because of bad weather, but white employees were paid for the full day.

On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address at Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane. In the close of the last speech of his career, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:

And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

King was booked in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel (owned by Walter Bailey) in Memphis. Abernathy, who was present at the assassination, testified to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed at Room 306 so often that it was known as the "King-Abernathy suite". According to Jesse Jackson, who was present, King's last words on the balcony before his assassination were spoken to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was attending: "Ben, make sure you play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."

King was shot by James Earl Ray at 6:01 p.m., April 4, 1968, as he stood on the motel's second-floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor. Jackson stated after the shooting that he cradled King's head as King lay on the balcony, but this account was disputed by other colleagues of King; Jackson later changed his statement to say that he had "reached out" for King.

After emergency chest surgery, King died at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only 39 years old, he "had the heart of a 60 year old", which Branch attributed to the stress of 13 years in the Civil Rights Movement.

Aftermath

The assassination led to a nationwide wave of race riots in Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Baltimore; Louisville; Kansas City; and dozens of other cities. Presidential candidate Robert F. "Bobby" Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King's death. He gave a short speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and urging them to continue King's ideal of nonviolence. James Farmer Jr., and other civil rights leaders also called for non-violent action, while the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for a more forceful response. The city of Memphis quickly settled the strike on terms favorable to the sanitation workers.

President Lyndon B. Johnson declared April 7 a national day of mourning for the civil rights leader. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended King's funeral on behalf of the President, as there were fears that Johnson's presence might incite protests and perhaps violence. At his widow's request, King's last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church was played at the funeral, a recording of his "Drum Major" sermon, given on February 4, 1968. In that sermon, King made a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity". His good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", at the funeral.

Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd on his way to white-ruled Rhodesia. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, though he recanted this confession three days later. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray pleaded guilty to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty. He was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. Ray later claimed a man he met in Montreal, Quebec, with the alias "Raoul" was involved and that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting, unsuccessfully, to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.

Allegations of conspiracy

Ray's lawyers maintained he was a scapegoat similar to the way that John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is seen by conspiracy theorists. Supporters of this assertion said that Ray's confession was given under pressure and that he had been threatened with the death penalty. They admitted that Ray was a thief and burglar, but claimed that he had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon. However, prison records in different U.S. cities have shown that he was incarcerated on numerous occasions for charges of armed robbery. In a 2008 interview with CNN, Jerry Ray, the younger brother of James Earl Ray, claimed that James was smart and was sometimes able to get away with armed robbery. Jerry Ray said that he had assisted his brother on one such robbery. "I never been with nobody as bold as he is," Jerry said. "He just walked in and put that gun on somebody, it was just like it's an everyday thing."

Those suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point to the two successive ballistics tests which proved that a rifle similar to Ray's Remington Gamemaster had been the murder weapon. Those tests did not implicate Ray's specific rifle. Witnesses near King at the moment of his death said that the shot came from another location. They said that it came from behind thick shrubbery near the boarding house—which had been cut away in the days following the assassination—and not from the boarding house window. However, Ray's fingerprints were found on various objects (a rifle, a pair of binoculars, articles of clothing, a newspaper) that were left in the bathroom where it was determined the gunfire came from. An examination of the rifle containing Ray's fingerprints also determined that at least one shot was fired from the firearm at the time of the assassination.

In 1997, King's son Dexter Scott King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a new trial.

Two years later, Coretta Scott King, King's widow, along with the rest of King's family, won a wrongful death claim against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found in favor of the King family, finding Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King and that government agencies were party to the assassination. William F. Pepper represented the King family in the trial.

In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice completed the investigation into Jowers' claims but did not find evidence to support allegations about conspiracy. The investigation report recommended no further investigation unless some new reliable facts are presented. A sister of Jowers admitted that he had fabricated the story so he could make $300,000 from selling the story, and she in turn corroborated his story in order to get some money to pay her income tax.

In 2002, The New York Times reported that a church minister, Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson—not James Earl Ray—assassinated King. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way." Wilson provided no evidence to back up his claims.

King researchers David Garrow and Gerald Posner disagreed with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. In 2003, Pepper published a book about the long investigation and trial, as well as his representation of James Earl Ray in his bid for a trial, laying out the evidence and criticizing other accounts. King's friend and colleague, James Bevel, also disputed the argument that Ray acted alone, stating, "There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man." In 2004, Jesse Jackson stated:

The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. And within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. ... I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray.

Legacy

King's main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in the U.S. Just days after King's assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Title VIII of the Act, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, prohibited discrimination in housing and housing-related transactions on the basis of race, religion, or national origin (later expanded to include sex, familial status, and disability). This legislation was seen as a tribute to King's struggle in his final years to combat residential discrimination in the U.S.

Internationally, King's legacy includes influences on the Black Consciousness Movement and Civil Rights Movement in South Africa. King's work was cited by and served as an inspiration for South African leader Albert Lutuli, who fought for racial justice in his country and was later awarded the Nobel Prize. The day following King's assassination, school teacher Jane Elliott conducted her first "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise with her class of elementary school students in Riceville, Iowa. Her purpose was to help them understand King's death as it related to racism, something they little understood as they lived in a predominantly white community. King has become a national icon in the history of American liberalism and American progressivism. King also influenced Irish politician and activist John Hume. Hume, the former leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, cited King's legacy as quintessential to the Northern Irish civil rights movement and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, calling him "one of my great heroes of the century."

King's wife, Coretta Scott King, followed in her husband's footsteps and was active in matters of social justice and civil rights until her death in 2006. The same year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, she established the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to preserving his legacy and the work of championing nonviolent conflict resolution and tolerance worldwide. Their son, Dexter King, serves as the center's chairman. Daughter Yolanda King, who died in 2007, was a motivational speaker, author and founder of Higher Ground Productions, an organization specializing in diversity training.

Even within the King family, members disagree about his religious and political views about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. King's widow Coretta said publicly that she believed her husband would have supported gay rights. However, his youngest child, Bernice King, has said publicly that he would have been opposed to gay marriage.

On February 4, 1968, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, in speaking about how he wished to be remembered after his death, King stated:

I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.

I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. And I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major. Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Beginning in 1971, cities such as St. Louis, Missouri, and states established annual holidays to honor King. At the White House Rose Garden on November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it is called Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Following President George H. W. Bush's 1992 proclamation, the holiday is observed on the third Monday of January each year, near the time of King's birthday. On January 17, 2000, for the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all fifty U.S. states. Arizona (1992), New Hampshire (1999) and Utah (2000) were the last three states to recognize the holiday. Utah previously celebrated the holiday at the same time but under the name Human Rights Day.

Liturgical commemorations

King is remembered as a martyr by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America with an annual feast day on the anniversary of his death, April 4. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commemorates King liturgically on the anniversary of his birth, January 15.

UK legacy and The Martin Luther King Peace Committee

In the United Kingdom, The Northumbria and Newcastle Universities Martin Luther King Peace Committee exists to honour King's legacy, as represented by his final visit to the UK to receive an honorary degree from Newcastle University in 1967. The Peace Committee operates out of the chaplaincies of the city's two universities, Northumbria and Newcastle, both of which remain centres for the study of Martin Luther King and the US Civil Rights Movement. Inspired by King's vision, it undertakes a range of activities across the UK as it seeks to "build cultures of peace."

Ideas, influences, and political stances

Religion

As a Christian minister, King's main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses. King's faith was strongly based in Jesus' commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God above all, and loving your enemies, praying for them and blessing them. His nonviolent thought was also based in the injunction to turn the other cheek in the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus' teaching of putting the sword back into its place (Matthew 26:52). In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King urged action consistent with what he describes as Jesus' "extremist" love, and also quoted numerous other Christian pacifist authors, which was very usual for him. In another sermon, he stated:

Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don't plan to run for any political office. I don't plan to do anything but remain a preacher. And what I'm doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man.

In his speech "I've Been to the Mountaintop", he stated that he just wanted to do God's will.

Nonviolence

Veteran African-American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was King's first regular advisor on nonviolence. King was also advised by the white activists Harris Wofford and Glenn Smiley. Rustin and Smiley came from the Christian pacifist tradition, and Wofford and Rustin both studied Gandhi's teachings. Rustin had applied nonviolence with the Journey of Reconciliation campaign in the 1940s, and Wofford had been promoting Gandhism to Southern blacks since the early 1950s. King had initially known little about Gandhi and rarely used the term "nonviolence" during his early years of activism in the early 1950s. King initially believed in and practiced self-defense, even obtaining guns in his household as a means of defense against possible attackers. The pacifists guided King by showing him the alternative of nonviolent resistance, arguing that this would be a better means to accomplish his goals of civil rights than self-defense. King then vowed to no longer personally use arms.

In the aftermath of the boycott, King wrote Stride Toward Freedom, which included the chapter Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. King outlined his understanding of nonviolence, which seeks to win an opponent to friendship, rather than to humiliate or defeat him. The chapter draws from an address by Wofford, with Rustin and Stanley Levison also providing guidance and ghostwriting.

Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's success with nonviolent activism, King had "for a long time ... wanted to take a trip to India". With assistance from Harris Wofford, the American Friends Service Committee, and other supporters, he was able to fund the journey in April 1959. The trip to India affected King, deepening his understanding of nonviolent resistance and his commitment to America's struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, "Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity".

Bayard Rustin's open homosexuality, support of democratic socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin, which King agreed to do. However, King agreed that Rustin should be one of the main organizers of the 1963 March on Washington.

King's admiration of Gandhi's nonviolence did not diminish in later years. He went so far as to hold up his example when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, hailing the "successful precedent" of using nonviolence "in a magnificent way by Mohandas K. Gandhi to challenge the might of the British Empire ... He struggled only with the weapons of truth, soul force, non-injury and courage."

Gandhi seemed to have influenced him with certain moral principles, though Gandhi himself had been influenced by The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a nonviolent classic written by Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy. In turn, both Gandhi and Martin Luther King had read Tolstoy, and King, Gandhi and Tolstoy had been strongly influenced by Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. King quoted Tolstoy's War and Peace in 1959.

Another influence for King's nonviolent method was Henry David Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience, which King read in his student days. He was influenced by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system. He also was greatly influenced by the works of Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, as well as Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis. King also sometimes used the concept of "agape" (brotherly Christian love). However, after 1960, he ceased employing it in his writings.

Even after renouncing his personal use of guns, King had a complex relationship with the phenomenon of self-defense in the movement. He publicly discouraged it as a widespread practice, but acknowledged that it was sometimes necessary. Throughout his career King was frequently protected by other civil rights activists who carried arms, such as Colonel Stone Johnson, Robert Hayling, and the Deacons for Defense and Justice.

Politics

As the leader of the SCLC, King maintained a policy of not publicly endorsing a U.S. political party or candidate: "I feel someone must remain in the position of non-alignment, so that he can look objectively at both parties and be the conscience of both—not the servant or master of either." In a 1958 interview, he expressed his view that neither party was perfect, saying, "I don't think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses ... And I'm not inextricably bound to either party." King did praise Democratic Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois as being the "greatest of all senators" because of his fierce advocacy for civil rights causes over the years.

King critiqued both parties' performance on promoting racial equality:

Actually, the Negro has been betrayed by both the Republican and the Democratic party. The Democrats have betrayed him by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed him by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of reactionary right wing northern Republicans. And this coalition of southern Dixiecrats and right wing reactionary northern Republicans defeats every bill and every move towards liberal legislation in the area of civil rights.

Although King never publicly supported a political party or candidate for president, in a letter to a civil rights supporter in October 1956 he said that he was undecided as to whether he would vote for Adlai Stevenson or Dwight Eisenhower, but that "In the past I always voted the Democratic ticket." In his autobiography, King says that in 1960 he privately voted for Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy: "I felt that Kennedy would make the best president. I never came out with an endorsement. My father did, but I never made one." King adds that he likely would have made an exception to his non-endorsement policy for a second Kennedy term, saying "Had President Kennedy lived, I would probably have endorsed him in 1964." In 1964, King urged his supporters "and all people of goodwill" to vote against Republican Senator Barry Goldwater for president, saying that his election "would be a tragedy, and certainly suicidal almost, for the nation and the world." King supported the ideals of democratic socialism, although he was reluctant to speak directly of this support due to the anti-communist sentiment being projected throughout the United States at the time, and the association of socialism with communism. King believed that capitalism could not adequately provide the basic necessities of many American people, particularly the African-American community.

Compensation

King stated that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of $50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups.

He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils". He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor, but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races".

The lack of attention given to family planning

On being awarded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America's Margaret Sanger Award on 5th May, 1966, King said:

Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain. There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims...

FBI and King's personal life

FBI surveillance and wiretapping

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered surveillance of King, with the intent to undermine his power as a civil rights leader. According to the Church Committee, a 1975 investigation by the U.S. Congress, "From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader."

The Bureau received authorization to proceed with wiretapping from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in the fall of 1963 and informed President John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Stanley Levison, a New York lawyer who had been involved with Communist Party USA. Although Robert Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so", Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy. The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison's and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. In 1967, Hoover listed the SCLC as a black nationalist hate group, with the instructions: "No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups ... to insure the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited."

NSA monitoring of King's communications

In a secret operation code-named "Minaret", the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored the communications of leading Americans, including King, who criticized the U.S. war in Vietnam. A review by the NSA itself concluded that Minaret was "disreputable if not outright illegal."

Allegations of communism

For years, Hoover had been suspicious about potential influence of communists in social movements such as labor unions and civil rights. Hoover directed the FBI to track King in 1957, and the SCLC as it was established (it did not have a full-time executive director until 1960). The investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when the FBI learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was New York City lawyer Stanley Levison.

The FBI feared Levison was working as an "agent of influence" over King, in spite of its own reports in 1963 that Levison had left the Party and was no longer associated in business dealings with them. Another King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked to the Communist Party by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). However, by 1976 the FBI had acknowledged that it had not obtained any evidence that King himself or the SCLC were actually involved with any communist organizations.

For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to communism, stating in a 1965 Playboy interview that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida". He argued that Hoover was "following the path of appeasement of political powers in the South" and that his concern for communist infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement was meant to "aid and abet the salacious claims of southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements". Hoover did not believe King's pledge of innocence and replied by saying that King was "the most notorious liar in the country". After King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, the FBI described King as "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country". It alleged that he was "knowingly, willingly and regularly cooperating with and taking guidance from communists".

The attempt to prove that King was a communist was related to the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were happy with their lot but had been stirred up by "communists" and "outside agitators". However, the 1950s and '60s Civil Rights Movement arose from activism within the black community dating back to before World War I. King said that "the Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals—the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations."

Adultery

Having concluded that King was dangerous due to communist infiltration, the FBI shifted to attempting to discredit King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, attempted to demonstrate that he also engaged in numerous extramarital affairs. Lyndon Johnson once said that King was a "hypocritical preacher".

Ralph Abernathy stated in his 1989 autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down that King had a "weakness for women", although they "all understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside of marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation". In a later interview, Abernathy said that he only wrote the term "womanizing", that he did not specifically say King had extramarital sex and that the infidelities King had were emotional rather than sexual. Abernathy criticized the media for sensationalizing the statements he wrote about King's affairs, such as the allegation that he admitted in his book that King had a sexual affair the night before he was assassinated. In his original wording, Abernathy had claimed he saw King coming out of his room with a lady when he awoke the next morning and later claimed that "he may have been in there discussing and debating and trying to get her to go along with the movement, I don't know."

In his 1986 book Bearing the Cross, David Garrow wrote about a number of extramarital affairs, including one woman King saw almost daily. According to Garrow, "that relationship ... increasingly became the emotional centerpiece of King's life, but it did not eliminate the incidental couplings ... of King's travels." He alleged that King explained his extramarital affairs as "a form of anxiety reduction". Garrow asserted that King's supposed promiscuity caused him "painful and at times overwhelming guilt". King's wife Coretta appeared to have accepted his affairs with equanimity, saying once that "all that other business just doesn't have a place in the very high level relationship we enjoyed." Shortly after Bearing the Cross was released, civil rights author Howell Raines gave the book a positive review but opined that Garrow's allegations about King's sex life were "sensational" and stated that Garrow was "amassing facts rather than analyzing them".

The FBI distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he did not cease his civil rights work. The FBI–King suicide letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part:

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

A tape recording of several of King's extramarital liaisons, excerpted from FBI wiretaps, accompanied the letter. King interpreted this package as an attempt to drive him to suicide, although William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the time, argued that it may have only been intended to "convince Dr. King to resign from the SCLC". King refused to give in to the FBI's threats.

In 1977, Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.

Police observation during the assassination

A fire station was located across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the boarding house in which James Earl Ray was staying. Police officers were stationed in the fire station to keep King under surveillance. Agents were watching King at the time he was shot. Immediately following the shooting, officers rushed out of the station to the motel. Marrell McCollough, an undercover police officer, was the first person to administer first aid to King. The antagonism between King and the FBI, the lack of an all points bulletin to find the killer, and the police presence nearby led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination.

Awards and recognition

King was awarded at least fifty honorary degrees from colleges and universities. On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in the U.S. In 1965, he was awarded the American Liberties Medallion by the American Jewish Committee for his "exceptional advancement of the principles of human liberty". In his acceptance remarks, King said, "Freedom is one thing. You have it all or you are not free."

In 1957, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. Two years later, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. In 1966, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America awarded King the Margaret Sanger Award for "his courageous resistance to bigotry and his lifelong dedication to the advancement of social justice and human dignity". Also in 1966, King was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In November 1967 he made a 24-hour trip to the United Kingdom to receive an honorary degree from Newcastle University, being the first African-American to be so honoured by Newcastle. In a moving impromptu acceptance speech, he said

There are three urgent and indeed great problems that we face not only in the United States of America but all over the world today. That is the problem of racism, the problem of poverty and the problem of war.

In 1971 he was posthumously awarded a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for his Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.

In 1977, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was posthumously awarded to King by President Jimmy Carter. The citation read:

Martin Luther King Jr. was the conscience of his generation. He gazed upon the great wall of segregation and saw that the power of love could bring it down. From the pain and exhaustion of his fight to fulfill the promises of our founding fathers for our humblest citizens, he wrung his eloquent statement of his dream for America. He made our nation stronger because he made it better. His dream sustains us yet.

King and his wife were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.

King was second in Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century. In 1963, he was named Time Person of the Year, and in 2000, he was voted sixth in an online "Person of the Century" poll by the same magazine. King placed third in the Greatest American contest conducted by the Discovery Channel and AOL.

Memorials and eponymous places and buildings

There are numerous memorials to King in the United States, including:

More than 730 cities in the United States have streets named after King.

King County, Washington, rededicated its name in his honor in 1986 and changed its logo to an image of his face in 2007.

The city government center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is named in honor of King.

In 1980, the U.S. Department of the Interior designated King's boyhood home in Atlanta and several nearby buildings the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.

A bust of Dr. King was added to the "gallery of notables" in the United States Capitol in 1986, portraying him in a "restful, nonspeaking pose."

The beginning words of King's "I Have a Dream" speech are etched on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, at the place where King stood during that speech. These words from the speech—"five short lines of text carved into the granite on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial"—were etched in 2003, on the 40th anniversary of the march to Washington, by stone carver Andy Del Gallo, after a law was passed by Congress providing authorization for the inscription.

In 1996, Congress authorized the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, of which King is still a member, to establish a foundation to manage fund raising and design of a national Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. King was the first African American and the fourth non-president honored with his own memorial in the National Mall area. The memorial opened in August 2011 and is administered by the National Park Service. The address of the monument, 1964 Independence Avenue, SW, commemorates the year that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.

The Landmark for Peace Memorial in Indianapolis, Indiana

The Homage to King sculpture in Atlanta, Georgia

The Dream sculpture in Portland, Oregon

The National Civil Rights Museum, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where King died

Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama

On October 11, 2015, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported a proposed "Freedom Bell" may be installed atop Stone Mountain honoring King and his "I Have a Dream" speech, specifically the line "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia."

Numerous other memorials honor him around the world, including:

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Church in Debrecen, Hungary

The King-Luthuli Transformation Center in Johannesburg, South Africa

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Forest in Israel's Southern Galilee region (along with the Coretta Scott King Forest in Biriya Forest, Israel)

The Martin Luther King Jr. School in Accra, Ghana

The Gandhi-King Plaza (garden), at the India International Center in New Delhi, India

In Norfolk, Virginia stands a memorial in honor of King. The 83-foot-high granite obelisk was conceived by former Norfolk Councilman and General District Court Judge Joseph A. Jordan Jr.

Five Dollar Bill

On April 20, 2016, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that the $5, $10, and $20 would all undergo redesign prior to 2020. Lew said that while Lincoln would remain on the obverse of the $5 bill, the reverse would be redesigned to depict various historical events that had occurred at the Lincoln Memorial. Among the planned designs are images from King's "I Have a Dream" speech and the 1939 concert by opera singer Marian Anderson.

Wikipedia

#Martin Luther King Jr.

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