A prophet is a person with deep moral insight, a quality sometimes accompanied with an exceptional power of expression – character traits very rarely bundled up into the psyche of any one person. When they are combined, those leadership qualities propel a person inexorably to the fore, and societies can change forever. Martin Luther King, Jr.was just such a man.
But a prophet enters at his own risk into a very dangerous profession indeed: Not everybody is ready to hear the message that comes along with the person: The message usually implies structural change within an organization or in society, and that can be threatening and costly for people, even if the change is to the good.
King was born in 1929 and was destined to enter his productive years in the 1960’s, a time of enormous turmoil and fermentation on many fronts in the American scene.
This American black man employed the medium of non-violence and civil disobedience to deliver his message, a notion established a long time ago in the early years of our republic by Henry David Thoreau. It would be for Martin Luther King, Jr. to apply it to the accumulated injustices of the 1960’s that had held back so many Americans for so long.
When MLK accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964 he said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.” That can be a tough one to swallow, but King put his life on the line for it.
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