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| Liberation
Psychology: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Beloved Community as a Model for Social Creativity By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D. Abstract The author presents his construction of Liberation Psychology as an innovative interpretation of the social creativity of Martin Luther King, Jr., using the Beloved Community as an organizing metaphor. Dr. King worked, struggled, and died for the community and national fulfillment of basic need satisfaction. He, like Abraham Maslow, saw that need deprivation is oppressive. The author focuses on the interplay of the fulfillment of eight basic need categories, influenced by humanistic, transpersonal, and developmental psychologies, with four themes of spiritual and existential life influenced by the Native American tradition. King was one of the most creative and influential leaders of our time who offered our world an image of living together without the soul destroying violence of racism, sexism, poverty, and war. The article reveals how Dr. King's dream of the Beloved Community can provide basic human need fulfillment through social creativity, making the Beloved Community possible. In the final analysis, agape means a recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself. (Martin Luther King, Jr., 1958, p. 85) The social creativity of Martin Luther King, Jr. revealed an authentic path of love in his life of spiritual combat for rights for all humankind. His model of a creative, viable, vital community based on love enabled the world to strive for the highest potential that we all share. He worked to make an egalitarian community founded on generosity and truth a reality in a world full of hatred, oppression, and the growing “plague” of the contagious, communicable diseases of poverty, sexism, racism and war. He maintained and demonstrated that the practice of nonviolent social action could transform the oppressed from self-hatred to self-love and could transform the oppressor from violence to empathy and compassion. Dr. King embodied in his social creativity model the virtues of kindness, selflessness, courtesy, firmness, courage, lawfulness, and love. It was on the risky and consuming themes of love and justice that the lover of God and humankind, Martin Luther King, Jr., showed us that the human being can become one with the Beloved in a community of solidarity. In his book The Hidden Human Image, Maurice Friedman points out the beauty of King's humanity.
King demonstrated that the person and the life-world are existentially lived aspects of a whole human being, shaping and forming each other through a creative dialogue. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s everyday community work was worship and ritual, in which his actions reminded him of the Love Force at the center of creation. His path of love and selfless action, his ability to be one-pointed in his devotional service to the transcendent and to humanity, and his willingness to lose his life for the values and human needs that he believed were necessary and essential, were the foundations of his ecological creativity. In this essay, the author will interchangeably use the terms social creativity, ecological creativity, and contextual creativity (Montuori and Purser, 1995). Martin's creativity was a labor of love no matter in what domain he was working. He was a creative orator, social scientist, theologian, philosopher, and preacher, and was able to create high community drama and mysticism that unveiled the evil system of segregation, racism, poverty, and war. The price he paid to be a creative person in a world that demanded and craved mediocrity was very high indeed. Liberation Psychology, a systems and individual psychology developed by this author, is concerned with basic human needs and the transpersonal dimensions of human life. Fulfilling basic needs is an economic, social, and political requirement in repairing broken community. Basic need satisfaction is more than a state in which individuals find and express their potential. It is a context and an environment that gives direction to one's growth, and that increases one’s ability to be creative, altruistic, and self-determined. In this container of basic need fulfillment, potential is discovered through dialogue within a loving, caring community, exemplified by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s beloved community. Because Martin's basic needs were fulfilled, he felt a calling—an undeniable expectation—that demanded he work selflessly to bring about a matrix and container in which all of humankind, regardless of skin color, could live and love together. This article focuses on Liberation Psychology and the interplay of the fulfillment of eight basic need categories and four themes of spiritual and existential life. These will be presented as a hermeneutic to understand the social creativity of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his metaphor of the beloved community. Liberation Psychology's four main themes encapsulate the dialogical relationship between the person, community, and the creative cosmos. The themes were influenced by the American Indian tradition as outlined in The Sacred Ways of Knowledge by Beck and Walters (1977). The themes are as follows:
Liberation Psychology outlines eight categories of basic needs that are both individual and contextual. These categories are not hierarchical. They are as follows:
The writings of Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology traditions, and the struggle for basic needs, for which Gandhi and King lost their lives, stimulated the development of the eight different need categories. Liberation Psychology punctuates both a person-centered and a systemic approach to creativity via a dialogical method that includes the individual and the social, political, and economic aspects of life and community. 1. A belief in or knowledge of the Creator or of unseen powers Liberation Psychology is a knowledge, love, and action psychology
that works to ensure that human beings' basic needs are addressed
and fulfilled. Historically the African-American tradition has been
to protest to get their people's basic needs satisfied. Martin Luther
King, Jr. said, “Man is a child of God, made in His image,
and therefore must be respected as such” (1967, p. 72). All
people, regardless of skin color, have dignity and worth because
of their relationship to the Supreme Personality. King saw that
when basic needs are not fulfilled the wholeness of personality
in the human being is destroyed. The slave religion was a protest theology in resistance to the enslavement theology of the dominant white church. African-Americans had to use creative strategies in order to protest in some manner against their captivity. The theology of deliverance and liberation was an approach to the Bible that reassured the African-American that he was morally superior to his slave master. The practice of slavery was diametrically opposed to the message of love in the Bible. King's grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams, came out of slavery's religious protest tradition and laid the foundation for the tradition of contextual creativity in the King family. Martin's father, Daddy King, brought forward the historical legacy of African-American social creativity by telling him stories about the protests of Martin's great-grandfather and grandfather against the slavery system and later against segregation. Andrew Young, Martin's close associate, wrote in the introduction to Daddy King, “Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up hearing his father preach against the injustices of a segregated society. The dynamic cadences of black Baptist oratory were in his blood. Speaking out against injustice was a way of life in Martin's family.” (King, 1980, p. 10) The protest tradition of social creativity ran through the veins of the King family. Knowledge of God and the archetypal world informed the protest tradition based on the trust and hope that deliverance and liberation from the American Pharaoh would happen, and that freedom was inevitable. The white church was powerful but not as powerful as Jesus, the great liberator. 2. All things and persons are interrelated and connected The themes of interconnectedness and sacredness of personality run through this paper and provide for the basis of Liberation Psychology. Throughout the African-American tradition and the religious standpoint of Martin Luther King, Jr., a person is known by the Universe, and Heaven and earth are one. The earth, as well as the African American's body, is the Holy Temple. King wrote the following (1967, pp. 190-191) about love and interconnectedness.
Within Martin's family, the admonition to love all people was consistently taught and supported. Andrew Young gives witness to the life long theme in King's family to love everybody and to the message passed on to Martin by his father, Daddy King.
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s personalism and his belief in a personal God enabled him to know and understand that the connective structure underlying all reality is the love and truth of the Creator. King wrote:
King's personalism called him to work against the violence of racism that destroyed personality in the oppressed and the oppressor. King's appreciation of the interconnectedness of everyone and everything and the command to consider all people as children of the Creator are the underlying reasons he updated the protest tradition of black people to include standing for peace and opposing the Vietnam War. He stood steadfast in his critique of war when some black leaders withdrew their support of him because the black protest movement had historically stood against racial, social, political and economic injustice and had not included protest against war. Martin saw that the actions of the Vietnam War were killing and maiming the children of the universe, both the Vietnamese and the disproportionately high numbers of young, poor black men who came back from the war wounded or dead. He saw the horror of children's bodies burned by napalm that led him to stand up and speak out against the war. He did not care if his actions went against the black protest tradition because he saw the whole global village as one world house. He wrote:
This understanding of interrelatedness and connectiveness formed his vision of the beloved community and fueled his social creativity. 3. Worship is a personal commitment to the sources of life and to the tradition of the prophets Both Native-American and African-American people were objects of the genocide of the American government's political and economic policies. Beck and Walters, American-Indian writers, (1977) state:
In the African-American Ebenezer Church, where his father was the pastor, Martin found fulfillment of his safety and security needs during a time that was dangerous for African-Americans in American society. The many hours of worship offered a break from the suffering imposed by the racist society in the South. King learned his style of social creativity by hearing and watching the dramatic delivery of his father's sermons. Daddy King took the stories of the Bible, enacted them dramatically, and enthusiastically brought them to life, dramatizing his social activism and social creativity. He taught his congregation that all people are equal because of their humanity and their relationship to the Divine. He demonstrated how to use the ideas of the Bible to refuse to accept the soul-destroying oppression of the dominant system of segregation. This family- and black-church tradition was apparent in Martin's social creativity and his mastery of oratory that he used to integrate the stories of the Bible with the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation in proclaiming his American Civil Religion (Bellah, 1975). Creative strategies such as sacrifice and redemptive suffering were part of the great history of African-American religion and the African-American community. Daddy King preached about the prophets, especially Moses and Jesus, who sacrificed themselves for their people. These models of love in action taught King how sacrifice and redemptive suffering could enable him to face the redemptive violence which served to preserve the established order of the dominant system of segregation (Wink, 1992). Almost four decades before Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged on the scene, African Americans paid serious attention to the Gandhi-led nonviolent independence struggle of the Indian people (Kapur, 1992, p. 157). In his time, King combined Jesus' method of redemptive suffering and the Gandhian concept of satyagraha, the “nonviolent resistance based on truth and non-sentimental love of the opponent.” (Kapur, 1992, p. 4) It was while he was at Crozer Seminary that King heard Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of the African American Howard University, preach at Philadelphia's Fellowship House on Mohandas K. Gandhi's satyagraha as a method of social change. King wrote that Johnson's message was “so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi's life and works” (1958, p. 76). He combined the methods of Jesus and Gandhi as the African-American religion and protest tradition, and the African-American college and university system appropriated them. In Stride Toward Freedom Dr. King wrote, “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.” (1958, p. 67) The church became the world for Martin Luther King, Jr. and worship was a commitment to social change. The lesson that A. D. Williams, Daddy King's father and mentor, taught Daddy King was a theme that was basic to Dr. King's social action and contextual creativity. Daddy King wrote:
At Martin's first church as its pastor, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin continued the social creativity he learned directly from his father and from the African-American professors he encountered while studying at Morehouse College. King revealed the continuity between his ancestors’ engaged spirituality and the social conscience of the church when he wrote:
Martin's grandfather Williams, who had been one of the first members of the NAACP, in 1906, indirectly influenced Martin's social consciousness. In 1920, Williams led rallies to stop the placement of school bonds on the ballot because Atlanta lacked a high school for African Americans. Daddy King's march in 1935 for voter's registration rights included more than a thousand marchers. Grandfather Williams and Daddy King organized these rallies and marches from the congregation of the black Ebenezer Baptist Church. They were a reflection of what was going on in the larger black protest movement that was the ground for both the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s and the architectural foundation of King's social creativity. 4. Morals and ethics set the limits and boundaries of personal and social behavior King's belief in the essential nature of nonviolence/love created the basis for his morals and his ethics. In his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958, pp. 81-86), he outlined the six basic aspects of his philosophy of nonviolence that set the moral and ethical mandates for his contextual creativity. 1. “. . . nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist.” (p. 81) Fear, which is the basis of violence, creates mistrust of other people. Once the belief that others are the enemy has been established it becomes easy to feel justified in using violence against them. The use of nonviolence because one fears confrontation is a coward's way of acquiescence to the oppressor. The way of acquiescence and the way of violence are both ways of the coward. Courageous and non-fear based nonviolent resistance to evil is the way of the brave. The acquiescence of submission was the basis of segregation and oppression in the South. Resisting this arrangement was the life mission of King's grandfather, his father, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. himself. At 6 years of age Martin promised Daddy King that he would help him fight segregation after they had been refused service for not staying in the colored section of a shoe store in downtown Atlanta. On the way home, following his refusal to acquiesce to the requirements of segregation, Daddy King tried to answer his son's questions, and help him make sense of what had happened.
In experiences such as this King saw his father make the choice to refuse to submit to the prominent arrangement forged in the South between blacks and whites. This was courageous, nonviolent resistance. King, Jr. wrote in Stride Toward Freedom, “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” (p. 173) 2. Nonviolence “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.” (p. 82) King aimed his nonviolent/love ethic toward liberation as well
as toward forgiveness and reconciliation. The resister's absorption
of the oppressor's violence with active nonviolent resistance --
replacing hatred with love -- converts the oppressor. King's transpersonal
understanding that a soul-force or love-force resides in the unconscious
of all people provided him with faith that the oppressor is redeemable.
Dr. King trusted that the redemptive suffering practiced by nonviolent
resisters who endure pain, hurt and violence will trigger the love-force
in the deep layers of the unconscious of the oppressor. The violent
oppressor will then feel empathy for the nonviolent resister and
embrace him or her, thereby bringing about reconciliation through
love. Healing broken community through love and reconciliation was
a driving force in King's ecological creativity. 3. “. . . the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil.” (p. 82) The attack of nonviolent resistance is against the system that creates evil. Terrorists, such as the person who bombed a church and killed four small black girls in September 1963, are a symptom of a system that manufactures evil and are as much victims of this evil as are the oppressed. Blaming and punishing individual racists who do evil by violence, and not changing the social forces that encourage such evil to be perpetrated, keeps the mythology of redemptive violence active with the belief that we can purify the world through violence. Martin wrote in Where Do We Go From Here, “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” (Quoted in Watley, 1985, p. 119) King's grandfather, A. D. Williams, had the courage to confront the editor of an Atlanta newspaper, The Georgian, which was printing insulting editorials about African-Americans. Although the editor ushered Williams out of his office with violence and anger, Rev. Williams left the office nonviolently. His response was to organize a boycott of black people who refused to buy products or services from merchants who advertised in The Georgian. This created an economic problem for the white merchants who then withdrew their advertisements, which caused the newspaper to go bankrupt. (King, 1980) Organizing the boycott was very dangerous for R. Williams, and it demonstrated the fearlessness of the King family heritage that embodied a tradition of social creativity. 4. Nonviolence includes “a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back.” (p. 82) The physical blows received from the police, the painful bites inflicted by police dogs, and the sting of water hoses brought forth inner strength and pride in the African-American nonviolent protestors. Being able to face violence with courage and nonviolence changed the perceptions of the self in the nonviolent resister. A strong inner experience transformed the self-hatred of the African American into self-compassion and self-love. Self-love and nonviolence, which support each other in a dialogical circularity, converted the African Americans from acquiescent victims to effective nonviolent resisters. Members of the domination system were changed also. Their compassion was triggered by witnessing the self-love and courage of the African Americans who faced their oppressors with nonviolence during marches and rallies. Media images such as those of the police force using attack dogs on black children in Birmingham blatantly revealed the violence of the domination system. The undeniable horror that the nation finally witnessed on television pressured the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to bring about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The African-American protest movement, over three hundred years old by the 1960s, had reached a point of great influence with effective organization, national media exposure, and King's wonderfully exciting speeches that changed the political landscape of America. Martin Luther King was doing what came naturally to the King family -- nonviolently resisting the evils of a domination system. King wrote:
5. Nonviolence “avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love.” (King, 1958, p. 83) Love in action is the enactment of power through justice. Marching, picketing, and organizing rallies to protest racism, economic injustice and war were the ways that Rev. Williams, Daddy King, and Martin Luther King, Jr. practiced love in action. These three freedom crusaders were not worried about the danger to their lives. They understood the message of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus said to resist evil nonviolently, to bless and love those who curse you and persecute you, to return love to them in the form of outward acts of love as well as internal prayer for their salvation and healing. They believed the peacemaker who works with unconditional love to restore community is doing the deed of the Gospel. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s message to love one's enemies influenced factions of the Civil Rights Movement from its beginnings in Montgomery in 1955 to the time of his murder in Memphis in 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not simply believe in the New Testament. His social creativity embodied the New Testament. The unconditional love that he had for the violent oppressor came out of following the way of Daddy King, Jesus, Gandhi, and the black prophetic protest tradition—the path of love, not hate. The existential appropriation and interpretation of the Old and New Testaments by his black church and black family influenced Dr. King. He received an intellectual framework from Morehouse College that helped him to imitate Gandhi and to imitate Jesus. His first mentor whom he strove to imitate, however, was his own father, Daddy King, who embodied the black prophetic tradition and the imitation of Jesus. 6. Nonviolence “is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice.” (p. 85) Martin Luther King, Jr. learned from the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus that at the center of the universe is a Supreme Reality of love and justice. King's understanding of personalism was that a personal love-force resides in the center of our psyche and at the center of the universe. He believed the knowledge and experience of that love-force offers validation of a being greater than the individual who is working to satisfy their basic needs such as safety, security, belonging, hope, trust, creativity, spirituality, peace, love and justice. King saw that the resulting hope and trust in the future, achieved through this understanding that love and justice reside at the center of the universe, gives the nonviolent resister optimism and confidence in the imminent conversion of the oppressor. The nonviolent resister’s belief that he or she has a cosmic companion that will bring God's will to earth confirms a pantheism that perceives every aspect of creation as an interconnected and interrelated manifestation enveloped in the Divine. It may seem on Good Friday with the crucifixion that the tyrants of the world are winning, but the resurrection comes on Easter Sunday. There is the trust and hope that the tyrant can be overcome and that the potential for the transformation of hate, racism, sexism, war, and economic injustice exists. The cosmic companion essentially lures the nonviolent resister to social creativity with the purpose of changing, transforming, and converting the violent domination system to one governed by love and justice. The cosmic companion also lures the violent oppressor to compassion and love through the experience of nonviolent confrontation. King wrote, “This faith is another reason why the nonviolent resister can accept suffering without retaliation. For he knows that in his struggle of justice he has cosmic companionship.” (1958, pp. 86-87). Cosmic companionship and the bending of the universe toward justice were foundational inspirations of hope and trust that supported King's entire contextual creativity of the beloved community. Liberation Psychology -- The Basic Needs The themes presented herein, plus African-American thought and Gandhian nonviolence, are motifs that run through Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work and that shaped the awareness of the basic need fulfillment of Liberation Psychology. The needs for justice, power, freedom, nonviolence, love, respect, belonging, trust, hope, safety, security, competence, uniqueness, gender, culture, creativity, and spirituality burn deep in oppressed people. The themes and basic needs developed in this article document the individual, family, and community satisfaction of elemental human needs that inspired the social creativity of Martin Luther King, Jr. Everybody is to be loved in King's social creativity, his theology, his depth and social psychology, his protest position, and his dream for the creation of the Beloved Community. Basic need fulfillment is essential for all human beings no matter where they live in the world house. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that our society must provide basic need satisfaction for all citizens to ensure and encourage success and the development of love and reconciliation. Abraham Maslow's basic needs hierarchy, which claims that lower needs have to be fulfilled before higher needs can emerge, does not match this author’s research with African Americans or Native Americans. In the midst of great poverty, there are people in these groups who have high self-esteem and who express a vast measure of creative skills. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is only one map out of many maps of reality, and it does not match the authors' understanding of need satisfaction and the development of psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. Maslow stressed individual humanistic growth and community synergistic energy that work together to create the healthy individual. Maslow emphasized that it takes a healthy society, similar to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Beloved Community, for self-actualizers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Daddy King, and A.D. Williams to flourish. Liberation Psychology underscores a dialogical relationship among the synergistic forces of the individual, community, and the transpersonal in satisfying and fulfilling basic needs. All the listed basic needs are important for motivation, self-esteem, and social creativity. Political, social, and economic fulfillment of these basic needs assures the dialogical relationship of person, God, and world, and are essential for the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Beloved Community. The cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner (1995) writes that there was no established audience or institution from which King arose as a creative leader.
The allegation of King's lack of preparedness and subsequent scarcity of influence on the black freedom movement in Gardner's writing is erroneous as it indicates a lack of adequate research on King. Gardner's cognitive psychology of creativity and leadership is important but limited because it does not describe the events or history that shape and form creative persons such as Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The black freedom struggle or black protest movement has been active since 1619, when slavers kidnapped the first slaves and brought them to this continent (Bennet, l969). The forces that shaped King's life and prepared him for the call to be the president of the Montgomery Improvement Committee that led the Montgomery Bus Boycott were the black protest movement, the black family, the black church, the black university, and the black southern community of Georgia (Baldwin, 1991 and 1992). Gardner's statement that “in all likelihood, King was hardly more prepared than the rest of American for the dramatic event that occurred in Montgomery on December 1, l955” shows a lack of understanding of the milieu from which King arose. Robert Parris Moses, in We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle, edited by Albert and Hoffman (1993) uses the metaphor of the ocean as being the Civil Rights Movement and all the organizers, leaders and King as waves that came out of the ocean. Moses writes:
Using Moses' metaphor, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a wave that emerged from the ocean of the black protest tradition acted out at that time in the Civil Rights Movement. The historical events, and King's unique dialogue with those events, formed his social creativity at a point in history which was a period of great creativity in several different disciplines. The movement did not stop with the death of King, as Gardner would lead us to believe. Although the media are not presently focusing on the movement, the waves of the black protest movement still appear in the form of socially creative African-Americans such as Jesse Jackson, Clayborne Carson, Cornel West, Katie Cannon, Deotis Roberts, Jacquelyn Grant, and Major Williams. The dialogue of his own unique personality with the ocean of his historical time, his personal life circumstances, and the legacy of his African-American family shaped King's creative genius. King marched, and was willing to die, for the fulfillment of essential basic needs and the embodiment of his beloved community in our life-world. Physical Needs Martin Luther King, Jr.'s parents maintained a family system that guarded the physical safety of their children. Physical safety issues were important because of the climate of segregation in the South in which Martin grew up. Bunch, Martin's mother, and Daddy King were mindful of the danger children could encounter because of the South's version of American apartheid. The addiction to violence by the majority of the people in the dominant culture in the South made it a dangerous place for African-American children and adults. King's family and extended family boundaries protected the children as well as they could from the physical violence of racism and segregation. The horrible nightmare of racism and violence was real. The South of King's childhood was a South that was still close to the physical enslavement of African-Americans, a South that still lynched people. White men and women who carried out the vicious aims of the dominant system with its redemptive violence still physically abused and assaulted black children and adults. As late as 1955, a little African-American boy, caught speaking improperly to a white woman, was lynched (Williams, 1987, pp. 38-57). King could not escape the consequences of being black in a southern setting where the southern gentlemen and ladies enhanced themselves by keeping African Americans inferior. The violence of poverty was another injustice with which most African-American families constantly lived. Although the King children were raised without poverty because Daddy King was a successful black middle class preacher, Martin learned at an early age about the rampant poverty and economic deprivation in the black community. The violence of poverty created self-hatred when African Americans internalized the materialistic philosophy of the dominant paradigm of the class system. Economic deprivation interfered with their trust and hope in the world. The black Baptist church in which King was raised practiced pro-socialization by reaching out and helping the poor, the sick, and the outcast. The self-help tradition of the African-American church and community kept the heart and attitude of the African-American trusting, hoping, and contending in a world of hatred (Friedman, 1970). At Morehouse College King’s experience that “racial and economic injustices were perennial allies” was just as Chivers, his sociology adviser, had taught him (Baldwin, 1991, p.26). Baldwin points out that in his formative years King was aware of the “impact of poverty on large numbers of his people in the 1930's and 1940's” (1991, p. 19). His neighborhood was not far from the black ghettos, and he experienced a dialectical life of living in comfort in a middle-class loving home while many of his classmates were living in the violence of poverty and deprivation (Baldwin, 1991). King wrote, “I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me” (1958, p. 90). These inevitable experiences of the twins of racism and economic insecurity etched in his mind a mission and a goal to release all the oppressed through an ecological creativity for social change. King learned to hate the capitalist system because of the economic deprivation that his people were forced to live in at the expense of their personality. Martin often wondered as a child why black people had to live in poverty (King, 1980). It became obvious to him as he matured that some inherent deficit in African-Americans did not force them into poverty. He realized that the segregated system and its economic apartheid compelled them to live this way. Trust and Hope Needs Trust in one's family and one's life-world are important needs that require fulfillment for one to experience self-esteem, motivation, and creativity. The strong love that surrounded him in his family nurtured and supported King. Martin learned he could trust his world because of the love, protection, and safety he experienced from his grandmother, whom he describes as being a saint. “She was very dear to each of us, but especially to me. I sometimes think that I was her favorite grandchild. I can remember very vividly how she spent many evenings telling us interesting stories” (quoted in Carson, Ed., 1992, p. 359). Daddy King, Martin’s courageous father, demonstrated for his son the need to stand strong to protect and love one's family. His mother's powerful affirmation of the worth of his personality as a human being regardless of skin color instilled hope into the attitude of young King. Through his mother's love he received life-affirming teachings of the black church, which taught that one should never give up trust and hope in life no matter how much bitterness and hate one experienced in a racist society. The ability to integrate and transform adverse childhood experiences and pain is a key to understanding Dr. King's ecological creativity. Martin's wife, Coretta, writes that her husband learned about segregation early in his life.
This traumatic experience made an impression on King's young mind. Having white friends during his first years, however, were important in King's formulation of his creative community of egalitarian civility—the beloved community. Because of his high self-esteem, King was able to creatively transform traumatic painful childhood experiences of rejection and racism into the possibility of a community of love in a way that led to hope instead of despair. Safety, Security and Competence Needs King's parents knew their children needed to feel safe and secure in order to experiment with their environment through exploration and curiosity. The King family and the church family environments had to support this adventuring for the children to learn skills and to feel competent. Feeling safe, secure and competent are basic needs that must be satisfied in order for one to learn to accept pluralism and diversity and to develop the divergent thinking that comes from dialogue in a pluralistic community. Divergent thinking and the ability to accept pluralism lead to high self-esteem and social creativity. Martin Luther King, Jr. was surrounded by many competent people in his family. His great-grandfather Willis Williams was a slave who became a Baptist preacher. His grandfather Adam Daniel (A. D.) Williams was a well-known activist minister at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, as was his father, Daddy King. Martin Luther King, Jr. received the legacy of his ancestors within the black religious archetypes of Priest, Prophet, and Pastor, the required roles over the years for ministers in the Ebenezer Baptist Church. A. D. Williams was politically successful in getting the first bond passed to build Booker T. Washington High School, the first black high school, and the first African-American YMCA, in Atlanta, Georgia. Daddy King, who became one of the most influential black men in Atlanta, Georgia, continued in the tradition of social creativity by managing a socially engaged church. His church was one of the most financially successful black churches in the South (King, 1980). These black prophets in King's family had the courage to stand with hope and love against slavery and segregation and to refuse to accept the evil system that was abusing both the oppressor and the oppressed. King received the benefits of being the preacher's son, which brought him attention, helped to form his self-identity, and raised his self-esteem. Mamma King, also a competent family member, was in demand from several different church organizations for her musical talents. She was in charge of the music in the church where she played the organ, and at times Martin sang. At four years of age Martin sang and performed in front of a National Baptist Convention while his mother played his accompaniment. Throughout his childhood years he received recognition for his singing, which enhanced his feelings of safety, security, and competence. In the African-American tradition the gospel songs and spirituals play just as important a role as the sermon in shaping and forming religious attitudes. It is easy to imagine that singing gospel music and spirituals, especially “I Want to Be More and More like Jesus,” helped to shape and form Martin's social creativity. Through a creative leap one can see how, for Dr. King, the city and the nation became the Open Cathedral for creative public drama and ritual. Gospels, spirituals, and songs were included in his contextual creativity to enhance the safety and security of the marchers and to help them feel more competent and hopeful in the civil rights campaigns. King's creative planning, along with his courage and fearlessness, were reflected in his organizational skills. By creating the right props and staging a creative community drama that maintained safety, he provided security and feelings of competence for the participants in the major campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement (Lischer, 1995). Power and Justice Needs Justice needs are satisfied in families where the power needs of individual family members are recognized. The nightly family meetings over dinner in the King family home empowered each family member while demonstrating justice. Gandhi’s teachings emphasized that we must practice justice in our own family and home before we can expect to have justice in the world. Power and emotional security come when a person can see that their thoughts and feelings influence and shape their environment and the outcome of their own lives. Martin knew he was with a person who could influence his surroundings when he saw his father stand against injustice. Daddy King would not let the police treat him badly just because of the color of his skin.
Daddy King was a strong father figure who gave the King children effective family boundaries against the racist domination system. This made them feel safe and secure and they had the feeling that power resided in their home. The identification of King with his father made Martin feel vicarious power as his father demonstrated the courage to live a life of authenticity. Martin saw his father's willingness to suffer by standing in courage and power against the segregated system. Hearing his father as the preacher at the Ebenezer Baptist Church talk about the Hebrew prophets and Moses and how they had the courage to stand against slavery, oppression and injustice helped Martin understand that one cannot live an authentic life without one's power and justice needs being met. Martin knew that Jesus' message of redemptive suffering is given life when power and justice meet, confront and deconstruct the domination system and its redemptive violence. The stories and sermons that Dr. King heard in his family and church about Moses, Jesus and the prophets were calls to restore relationships and to heal broken communities. He realized the importance of power and justice working together to restore a community to wholeness, to bring it out of chaos and to create the beloved community. The lives of Moses and Jesus in the stories that his grandmother and aunt told him helped Martin see the power in removing the barriers of segregation and social oppression in order for justice to flourish (Baldwin, 1991 and 1992, Paris, 1985). The inspiration for King's social creativity and the beloved community was justice as love in action. Belonging, Respect and Love/Nonviolence Needs Children who have had their belonging and love/nonviolence needs met have a strong identity of self by middle adolescence, which makes them creative and turned on with life; they thrive and have empathy for others. They practice altruism and develop respect and compassion for themselves and for other children. Self-respect helps them to have compassion for and acceptance of their own deficits and inadequacies. Likewise, they are more tolerant of other people and they are more apt to confirm others with unconditional love. These children become the loving members of our society. Martin's family, church, and the black college system intertwined in a dialogical community. Through his dialogue with family and church, he learned he had inherent worth and dignity by being a child of God. His African American education gave him the intellectual paradigm and worldview of the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of all of reality. This worldview helped him to integrate divergent (novelty) and convergent (accuracy) thinking (Dacey, 1989) with the ability to have a coherent framework and system of thought. The ability to perceive the whole is important to creative thinking. Morehouse College, a college for African-American students, and the African-American professors Benjamin Mays, Walter R. Chivers and George Kelsey were influential in the formation of King's community creativity. As King was only 15 years old when he entered Morehouse College, this system did much to shape his intellectual skills; it was another extended family. It was the school that his grandfather Williams and his father, Daddy King, also attended. The Morehouse professors reassured Martin that he was intellectually capable of making creative contributions to the understanding of capitalistic problems and to the development of creative solutions to economic deprivation and racial oppression. His classes on religion, philosophy, psychology, and sociology included critiques of racism and discourses on a good society in ways that did not separate the caring, loving tradition from the intellectual discourse. The interrelatedness of ideas at Morehouse College -- the social, political, and economic with the Christian ideas of the coherence of the universe -- emphasized that “I am my brother's keeper” and “what belittles my neighbor belittles me.” These ideas socially constructed Dr. King's contextual creativity while deconstructing the delusional propaganda of the domination system -- the principalities and powers of the system of segregation (Wink, 1986 and 1992). Dr. King's worldview did not separate the rational from love. His studies at Morehouse College, Crozer Seminary, and Boston University gave him an intellectual construct to frame his family values and a creative systematic philosophy of religion and community. The strong love of human life that King felt and experienced from his mother and grandmother motivated him to the utopian ideal that through the practical action of meeting the redemptive violence of the society with redemptive suffering of nonviolent resistance the oppressor could be transformed. Love in action and nonviolent direct social action were practices to make his social creative metaphor of a beloved community become a reality. Martin Luther King, Jr. was prepared for his mission as a spokesperson for the Civil Rights Movement by the powerful nonviolence of the confirmation of love through his family, combined with the social construction and intellectual world view that he learned at Morehouse College, which gave him the necessary cognitive skills to discern the evils of the segregation system. Armed with the power of nonviolent love, and belonging to a tradition that respected personhood as opposed to the thinghood of the racist system, Martin had the emotional strength to form a strong foundation for his contextual creativity and to construct the metaphor of the beloved community. After several years of experience in the black freedom movement Dr. King grew in maturity and in his understanding of the creative dynamic of essential basic needs fulfillment to expand his metaphor of the beloved community to the world house. Uniqueness, Gender and Culture Needs His mother's humanistic approaches to parenting met Martin’s uniqueness need. She warned Daddy King to be cautious because his powerful personality could overwhelm the children and steal their individuality. Daddy King was a loving father who understood the limitations of his being too quick to use punishment. Therefore, he and his wife chose to make decisions together concerning the disciplining of the children. This quote from Coretta Scott King revealed the love of Martin's grandmother that compensated for Daddy King's harshness. Martin would tell me of his grandmother's wonderful spiritual qualities and also of her soft heart. When Daddy King would whip Martin for something he'd done, Martin would take his punishment without a word, determined never to cry, even when he was quite young. But in the background, always, was his grandmother Williams, tears streaming down her face, unable to bear the punishment” (1969, p.76). Daddy King wanted his children to have their own uniqueness, and he understood the influence a parent could have on a child. He knew that even if he were understanding and authoritative he could over-influence the children in authoritarian moments to do what he wanted them to do with their lives. Martin's mother understood the uniqueness needs of her children, and Daddy King wrote about his wife's admonition to let the children be themselves. “ ‘Don't push the boys too hard, King,’ Bunch would often warn me. ‘It's easy to turn children away from things that you want so much. Let them be who they'll be’ ” (King, 1980, p. 127). The most precious love that two parents can give to their children is to let them be who they want to be, to accept and confirm their uniqueness. There was definite gender recognition for Christine, Martin's sister, who was able to develop in her own direction. Gender recognition is important in order for a child to be who they want to be in spite of family pressure to be a certain way or to follow a certain life path. Christine seems to have been able to be who she wanted to be because of the loving family in which she was raised. She developed a deep femininity because she had three strong black women as role models -- an effective and creative matriarchy that had a powerful role in the development of her self-identity and the family social creativity of standing against oppression. The strong modeling of his father and the other African-American male mentors who influenced him all his life met Martin's gender needs. They were examples to him of living authentically and courageously, of standing for one's beliefs and for the betterment of his people. These influences shaped and formed his deep masculinity. The King children's culture needs were met in ongoing learning and confirmation. King had wonderful cultural protection from family, church, and community wherever he lived. Being African-American, Martin was culture conscious all his life. The cultural foods, music, blues, and spirituals of the South and the southern urban African-American culture wrapped around Martin throughout his formative years. Even when he went east to attend Crozer Seminary and Boston University, black southern culture surrounded him (Baldwin, 1991 and 1992). Family friends were pastors of the black Baptist churches he attended in the East. A southern friend introduced him to Coretta Scott, his future wife, who was also from the South. The continuous southern community protection, the confirmation of his uniqueness and his gender and his black southern awareness created the safety and security that he needed to even dream of a beloved community, where one's uniqueness would be confirmed regardless of one's gender, one's culture, or the color of one's skin. In the beloved community, their character would confirm a person and anywhere they would travel in the world house they would always be among brothers and sisters experiencing unconditional love. Freedom and Self-Determination Needs African-American children experiences serious injury when others judge them negatively by the color of their skin. The United States with its obsession about skin color makes decisions that put the African-American child at a disadvantage but at the same time denies that racism exists in American society. A colorblind mentality underlies the current attacks on affirmative action in our nation. Now all of a sudden, the people are led to believe that the American society understands differences and is open to diversity. Racism, poverty, and sexism go together. The poverty of African-American children does not happen because their parents are lazy, stupid, or incapable of being competitive in white corporate America. The capitalistic system has built-in racism because it leaves people of color locked-out and locked-in at the same time (Kemp-Blackmon, 1995). When banks will not lend money to African-American families because of the color of their skin, so that they might live where they want to live, it leaves their freedom and self-determination needs in a deficit. African-Americans are locked in to living in the famous American ghetto that locks them out of opportunities for economic advancement. At the same time, however, the mass media message is that all Americans have the same opportunity and those who do not succeed are lazy and irresponsible. The psychology of being both locked-in to the propaganda that anyone in American can succeed and locked-out by the economic and racial oppression is a double-bind situation that makes African-American children feel like they are accepted yet rejected and locked out at the same time. Economic and racial segregation characterize the modern American economic apartheid. The domination system uses propaganda of delusion to say that we are all free and self-determined and that we all are responsible for our own existence. The movement to deregulate national and international corporations is cruel and unusual punishment to poor children and their families. Economic policies, passed and implemented by the racist and sexist Congress, have the potential to cause millions more children to become homeless. Americans have worked successfully to overcome slavery and segregation. Nonetheless, racism, sexism, and poverty are causing the same debilitating conditions that slavery and segregation caused black children in the past. These children will have low self-esteem and self-hatred because of the symbolic racism (Farley, 1982) of being locked in and locked out at the same time. The prophetic call that preceded King was to end slavery; the prophetic call during Martin's lifetime was to end segregation. After the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. the question is this: Do we have the love, the freedom, the courage and the self-determination to answer the prophetic call of our day to end the new apartheid of racism, sexism and economic injustice? The crucifixion for King meant that a prophet, the man Jesus, was willing to stand on his own ground and to unmask the domination system (Wink, 1986) that was blind and evil. Jesus stressed, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., that we need not be concerned with the individual, but with the domination system, which keeps producing racism, sexism, war, and poverty throughout the ages. he system needs constant reformation. We can never be comfortable
because the plague of injustice in the domination system constantly
re-emerges and hurts human life, especially children. Jesus died
by crucifixion because he wanted to live a life of freedom and self-determination.
King saw in the crucifixion a symbol of the violence of the domination
system toward the man Jesus who stood for authentic expression and
self-determination through nonviolent redemptive suffering. King
said that the crucifixion shows us the intellectual and spiritual
blindness of humankind and the love of God Creativity and Spirituality Needs The use of creativity, such as in storytelling, facilitates the spiritual aspects of a child's development. Creative and spiritual freedom of expression is a deep psychological need of the child that helps the child transform a serious, ugly world into a world of beauty and love. The psychology of hope and resistance influenced Martin affectively and cognitively from the cradle until his death. It was impressed upon him through his family and the long tradition of the black freedom movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a black prophet, raised from his people to speak for God and for all oppressed and poor people. Dr. King's study while in Morehouse College of the nonviolent creativity of the Biblical prophets of justice, Jeremiah and Amos, inspired his use of words, poetry, worship, and ceremony in the service of social creativity. Moses, the prophets, and Jesus used creative expression and poetry in their engaged spirituality. Martin learned the importance of an engaged spirituality from Morehouse College through his work with George Kelsey and Benjamin Mays (King, 1958 and 1967). He gained knowledge of the essential necessity of meeting the human needs for hope and freedom from his father's sermons and his daily examples of refusing to accept segregation. The Bible stories read to him by his aunt and his grandmother, along with singing hymns, gospels, and spirituals, shaped and molded him culturally and spiritually. The fulfillment of his trust and hope needs gave him the safety, security, motivation, and confidence to be creative. Creativity is a precious requirement in order to keep one's hope and freedom alive. Dr. King used symbolic images, words and poetry to frame his prophetic ministry into a creative expression that moved thousands of people to tears, excitement, and nonviolent courage. His ancestors passed on to Martin Luther King, Jr., through the archetypes of Pastor, Priest, and Prophet, the power and influence of creative spiritual expression in daily life (Baldwin, 1991 and 1992). Martin's family and church manifested these three archetypal expressions. Daddy King modeled the archetype of the Pastor by in caring for the sick in his own congregation and in trying to heal his community. Daddy King's social creativity expressed the social gospel in ways such as leading a teachers' strike or by insisting on using a white only elevator in registering to vote. He modeled the Priest for his son when he led the rituals of Eucharist in the church and prayer in his home. Martin used the black spiritual archetype of the Priest in his public rituals during the marches that were symbolic of the Exodus of Moses leading his people out of bondage and slavery. The aspect of public ritual in the marches was apparent in Selma, Alabama, in l965, when Martin stopped and knelt to pray at the Selma Bridge. This great ritual march brought his people the Voting Rights Bill of 1965 (Lischer, 1995). During the Selma march, he was acting as Pastor in his public sermon in which he told the nation what it needed to heal as a society. King embodied the Prophet when he courageously engaged the system, named the errors of the system, unmasked the corrupt laws and exposed the naked evil of our society by standing against injustice. He learned in early childhood and at 15 at Morehouse College, through his black family and black church, and through the history of the black protest movement, how to add a world view to his social creativity. Martin Luther King, Jr. embroidered the archetypes of the Pastor, Priest, and Prophet into an ecological social creativity that served to make his metaphor of the beloved community a practical reality. Conclusion The history and tradition of African Americans and Native Americans, humanistic and transpersonal psychologies, developmental psychology, and the eastern thought of Mohandas Gandhi form the basis of Liberation Psychology. This article has shown the interplay of the four themes and the eight basic needs categories of Liberation Psychology with the social creativity of Martin Luther King, Jr. The author has delineated the how of Dr. King's dream of the Beloved Community, illustrating that meeting basic human needs is essential to the creation of individual health and creativity, to the creation of communities based on love and justice,e and to the creation of a world house in which all of God's children can live in harmony. The struggle for basic human need fulfillment as a guideline enabled Martin Luther King, Jr. to become one of the most creative and influential leaders of our time and to offer our world an image of living together without the soul destroying violence of racism, sexism, poverty and war. Basic human need fulfillment through social creativity makes the beloved community possible. References Albert, P. J. & Hoffman, R. (1993). We
Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle.
New York: Da Capo Press.
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