held on the evening of her trial, the night when a young Martin Luther King Jr., the head of the brand-new Montgomery Improvement Association, roused all of Montgomeryâs black community to boycott the buses. âSince it had to happen,â King told the crowd, âIâm happy it happened to a person like Rosa Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character. Mrs. Parks is unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there.â
Later that year Parks agreed to go on a fund-raising speaking tour with King and other civil rights leaders. She suffered insomnia, ulcers, and homesickness along the way. She met her idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote of their encounter in her newspaper column: âShe is a very quiet, gentle person and it is difficult to imagine how she ever could take such a positive and independent stand.â When the boycott finally ended, over a year later, the buses integrated by decree of the Supreme Court, Parks was overlooked by the press. The
New York Times
ran two front-page stories that celebrated King but didnât mention her. Other papers photographed the boycott leaders sitting in front of buses, but Parks was not invited to sit for these pictures. She didnât mind. On the day the buses were integrated, she preferred to stay home and take care of her mother.
Parksâs story is a vivid reminder that we have been graced with limelight-avoiding leaders throughout history.Moses, for example, was not, according to some interpretations of his story, the brash, talkative type who would organize road trips and hold forth in a classroom at Harvard Business School. On the contrary, by todayâs standards he was dreadfully timid. He spoke with a stutter and considered himself inarticulate. The book of Numbers describes him as âvery meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.â
When God first appeared to him in the form of a burning bush, Moses was employed as a shepherd by his father-in-law; he wasnât even ambitious enough to own his own sheep. And when God revealed to Moses his role as liberator of the Jews, did Moses leap at the opportunity? Send someone else to do it, he said. âWho am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?â he pleaded. âI have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and tongue.â
It was only when God paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the assignment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would be the public face of the operation. âIt will be as if he were your mouth,â said God, âand as if you were God to him.â
Complemented by Aaron, Moses led the Jews from Egypt, provided for them in the desert for the next forty years, and brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. And he did all this using strengths that are classically associated with introversion: climbing a mountain in search of wisdom and writing down carefully, on two stone tablets, everything he learned there.
We tend to write Mosesâ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMilleâs classic,
The Ten Commandments
, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We donât ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.
If Parks spoke through her actions, and if Moses spoke through his brother Aaron, today another type of introverted leader speaks using the Internet.
In his book
The Tipping Point
, Malcolm Gladwell explores theinfluence of âConnectorsââpeople who have a
Later that year Parks agreed to go on a fund-raising speaking tour with King and other civil rights leaders. She suffered insomnia, ulcers, and homesickness along the way. She met her idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote of their encounter in her newspaper column: âShe is a very quiet, gentle person and it is difficult to imagine how she ever could take such a positive and independent stand.â When the boycott finally ended, over a year later, the buses integrated by decree of the Supreme Court, Parks was overlooked by the press. The
New York Times
ran two front-page stories that celebrated King but didnât mention her. Other papers photographed the boycott leaders sitting in front of buses, but Parks was not invited to sit for these pictures. She didnât mind. On the day the buses were integrated, she preferred to stay home and take care of her mother.
Parksâs story is a vivid reminder that we have been graced with limelight-avoiding leaders throughout history.Moses, for example, was not, according to some interpretations of his story, the brash, talkative type who would organize road trips and hold forth in a classroom at Harvard Business School. On the contrary, by todayâs standards he was dreadfully timid. He spoke with a stutter and considered himself inarticulate. The book of Numbers describes him as âvery meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.â
When God first appeared to him in the form of a burning bush, Moses was employed as a shepherd by his father-in-law; he wasnât even ambitious enough to own his own sheep. And when God revealed to Moses his role as liberator of the Jews, did Moses leap at the opportunity? Send someone else to do it, he said. âWho am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?â he pleaded. âI have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and tongue.â
It was only when God paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the assignment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would be the public face of the operation. âIt will be as if he were your mouth,â said God, âand as if you were God to him.â
Complemented by Aaron, Moses led the Jews from Egypt, provided for them in the desert for the next forty years, and brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. And he did all this using strengths that are classically associated with introversion: climbing a mountain in search of wisdom and writing down carefully, on two stone tablets, everything he learned there.
We tend to write Mosesâ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMilleâs classic,
The Ten Commandments
, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We donât ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.
If Parks spoke through her actions, and if Moses spoke through his brother Aaron, today another type of introverted leader speaks using the Internet.
In his book
The Tipping Point
, Malcolm Gladwell explores theinfluence of âConnectorsââpeople who have a
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