MARTIN LUTHER KING — PROUD TO BE MALADJUSTED As a campaigner and extraordinary orator, MLKs speaking was geared towards making a case and convincing others of its merit. Thus, he reused certain concepts and turns-of-phrase repeatedly, dropping them in to speeches where ever that notion buttressed the particular argument he was making in a particular setting. Here is a small snippet of a rhetorical concept he used repeatedly, namely the idea of maladjustment and never intend[ing] to become adjusted to the injustices that he was alluding to. https://youtube/watch?v=zXEIYpnlxbw In at least one other speech MLK went further and — admittedly mostly for rhetorical effect — called for the creation of an International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment https://youtube/watch?v=nDbm6Cv6tSA This powerful rhetorical concept of maladjustment was also used to great effect, and in the most appropriate of settings, in an extraordinary speech King gave to the American Psychological Association, seven months before his assassination. psychologytoday/blog/the-peoples-professor/201301/mlking-jrs-visit-psychology-1 The speech is less extraordinary for its eloquent pithiness — for its eloquent in parts like the Gettysburg Address, but at 10 pages long, cannot be described as pithy — than for the fact that it shows where Kings thinking had evolved to seven months before his death. It also shows him speaking directly to a pillar of the Establishment and calling it out for what he saw as its systemic failings. The rhetorical reappropriation of the word maladjustment surely hit its apex before this audience of psychologists. For those interested in the history of the US Civil Rights movements, this speech before the APA in 1967 shows how Kings campaigning had expanded past race relations. Notably, he spoke strongly, by this stage, against the Vietnam War, and he was probably already moving towards the Poor Peoples Campaign that was to transcend racial boundaries, that he was in the process of organising at the time of his assassination seven months later, and that occurred posthumously. Perhaps not coincidentally, another of the assassinated Civil Rights leaders, Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers, who was killed quite brazenly by the US authorities when he was quite young, had started to emerge as a future charismatic leader. He had made his mark by organising a similar trans-racial movement of poor people, politicising and uniting groups that had been gangs of young men in the African American, Latino & Appellation communities.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 06:52:48 +0000
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