Blog about Leadership

This last week, CNN broadcast a new documentary from their Special Investigations Unit (SIU), Black in America. From CNN’s website, “Forty years after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., CNN took an unprecedented look at the state of black America in ‘CNN Presents: Black in America. The success, struggle, pain and pride.’”

I have watched part of this new documentary, but I have it recorded on DVR to finish the entire four-hour documentary. I believe it is a compelling look at a social issue from our history and the effect on our present. In light of this thought-provoking motion picture and the current political news with Barack Obama as the presumptive DNC nominee for President, I wanted to revisit an article I wrote over a year ago.

A course of a different color – the story of a white man immersed in a black man’s world in 1959:

John Howard Griffin authored a compelling, true story that grips the mind of everyone willing to hope and dream of a better world and a better America. Knowing full well the potential for evil found rooted in the biased discrimination that plagued the civil rights movement during the mid-twentieth century, Griffin embarked on a journey to learn the reality of racial discrimination from the perspective of the black man. Encountering the obvious obstacle of his white skin, Griffin darkened the pigment of his flesh with the medical guidance of a dermatologist and sufficient exposure to a sun lamp. The journey of a white man disguised as a black man is chronicled in the pages of Black Like Me, which is available here.

This book is a must read for anyone willing to confront the wrongs of this world, to believe in the potential good of the human spirit, and to believe in the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as colorblind. I believe this is a book that everyone should read at least once. Leaders may want to read this book once a year.

A leader understands the different perspectives of a situation. Great leaders have the ability to grasp the other person’s point of view. There were (and are) many misconceptions in race relations on all sides. It took great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr, and John Howard Griffin to break through the misconceptions by understanding the other’s point of view.

Black Like Me

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A course of a different color – the story of a white man immersed in a black man’s world in 1959:

John Howard Griffin authored a compelling, true story that grips the mind of everyone willing to hope and dream of a better world and a better America. Knowing full well the potential for evil found rooted in the biased discrimination that plagued the civil rights movement during the mid-twentieth century, Griffin embarked on a journey to learn the reality of racial discrimination from the perspective of the black man. Encountering the obvious obstacle of his white skin, Griffin darkened the pigment of his flesh with the medical guidance of a dermatologist and sufficient exposure to a sun lamp. The journey of a white man disguised as a black man is chronicled in the pages of Black Like Me, which is available here.

This book is a must read for anyone willing to confront the wrongs of this world, to believe in the potential good of the human spirit, and to believe in the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as colorblind. I believe this is a book that everyone should read at least once.  Leaders may want to read this book once a year.

 A leader understands the different perspectives of a situation.  Great leaders have the ability to grasp the other person’s point of view.  There were (and are) many misconceptions in race relations on all sides.  It took great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr, and John Howard Griffin to break through the misconceptions by understanding the other’s point of view.

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