"If Lincoln's example were taken to heart, life undoubtedly would improve up and down the corporate line."--The New York Times

"Remarkable ... a lively and entertaining study that delivers uncommon good sense."--USA Today

"This expert, detailed record of Lincoln's leadership qualities not only illuminates the past, it might also help light the way to the future."--Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York

It has been said that there were three revolutions in American history -- spaced approximately one century apart: The American Revolution (1776-1783) was a violent war fought to achieve independence from Great Britain. It ended with the establishment of the United States of America as a free nation governed by democracy. The Civil War (1861-1865), an extraordinarily brutal armed conflict, was waged primarily over America's enslavement of human beings of African descent. The final result was formal eradication of the institution of slavery. The third revolution was the American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968), a mostly nonviolent period of transformation (but no less a revolution) conducted to change human behavior relating to the doctrine of racial prejudice known as "separate but equal." The concluding result was the elimination of most federal-and state-sanctioned segregation and discrimination practices. Taken collectively, these three major transformational events were something of a march toward achievement of the American dream.

Realizing that slavery was incompatible with the ideal that "all men are created equal," Thomas Jefferson, in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, provided for the elimination of the institution. However, representatives of America's southern colonies refused to approve the Declaration unless Jefferson's slavery clause was removed. In order to found the nation, therefore, action on the slavery issue was left to future generations.

That monumental decision indicated the founding fathers clearly understood that any massive social change cannot occur all at once. Therefore, in order to realize America's idealistic dream, change would have to happen through a series of steps over a significant period of time. First, a new system of government had to be created -- which the founding fathers accomplished. Next, the formal abolishment of the institution of slavery had to occur. Abraham Lincoln took care of that step. And third, unjust laws and behaviors had to be revoked and changed-- those that flowed from hundreds of years of ingrained attitudes developed in an economic culture based, in large part, on the monstrous practice of slavery. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who assumed leadership for this daunting task, may have had the toughest job of all. For the realities of human nature ensure that the waging of a violent war, with weapons of individual and mass destruction, will not change the hearts, minds, and feelings of a vast majority of people, especially if they have previously wielded power over the minority.

To clearly understand the series of fateful events in the 1950s and 1960s, it's necessary to place the American civil rights movement in the context of 350 years of African-American history. Only then can the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., be fully appreciated.

In August of the year 1619, twelve months before the Mayflower reached Plymouth Rock with the Pilgrims, twenty-three people arrived aboard a ship in Jamestown, Virginia. These first African immigrants to America were free men and women. In the common practice of indentured servitude, they sold their services to planters for a certain number of years. Poor Europeans had participated in this system for decades as a means of traveling to and settling in the New World. After their terms of indenture (usually three to seven years) were completed, they were free to move on and live their lives as they chose.

For the next two generations (forty years), Africans and their American-born descendants were free people. They formed their own settlements, worked and acquired property, and mixed into American society. They also voted and held public office.

Gradually, however, powerful social and economic forces, propelled by a worldwide demand for crops grown in America, created a widespread movement toward slavery. Africans, who comprised a small minority of the overall population, were chosen as the group to be enslaved largely because of the color of their skin. Being black, they were not easily able to blend in with the majority of European-Americans. By the 1660s, the American colonies had begun passing laws that made Africans and African-Americans slaves for life. And the highly profitable European slave trade finally reached the shores of America.

From 1700 to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the African population of America increased tenfold -- from 50,000 to 500,000. Nearly all newly arrived slaves in America were kidnapped from the west coast of Africa or sold by neighboring tribes and then transported across the Atlantic Ocean against their will. They were manacled and chained together, taken aboard cargo ships, and packed like animals into small spaces below deck for the two-month trip to the New World. Malnourishment, disease, and suicide led to death rates as high as 25 percent. Upon arrival, those who survived were sold into slavery at auctions in slave markets, or as retail goods in taverns and warehouses. Many were also purchased in advance or sold on consignment.

During those years, slavery became an ingrained part of the American economy and culture. A culture of racism and separatism perpetuated itself -- one that labeled African-born or African-American people as inferior, unintelligent, barbarous, and simpleminded. Slaves could be sold indiscriminately, families broken apart, and women raped by their masters. Many new laws were passed to strengthen slaveholders' rights. For example, disobedient slaves could be punished with severe physical brutality that included whippings, castration, and branding. Runaway slaves could be killed for resisting arrest.

Despite the tough laws and terrible punishments, slaves were not totally submissive. Periodically, individual acts of resistance or actual slave revolts took place. In 1729 and 1739, slaves rose up and killed their masters in several northern and southern states -- which led to further strengthening of statutes and enforcement of laws against disobedience. All the slaves who participated in the revolts were hanged or set on fire, or both.

Several African-Americans also attempted to fight against slavery in the courts. They raised funds, hired lawyers, and filed suits. On rare occasions, chiefly in the North, they won small concessions. Most often, though, the British-based judiciary system slammed the door on their requests.

With time, the slaves embraced American Christianity and blended it with their own African culture. They gathered in remote woods at night because they were not allowed to meet openly. At these meetings, they prayed, commiserated with one another, and sang spiritual hymns and songs -- many of which they composed themselves. The Christian religion gave them hope and sustenance. And the music lifted their spirits and became a vital part of slave culture.

The period surrounding the American Revolution began to see some change and progress. The Declaration of Independence provided a grand idea in such simple and general language that African-Americans mired in slavery could not be excluded. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," wrote Thomas Jefferson: "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The Declaration also stated that "when governments are destructive of these ends as evidenced by bad faith, it is the duty of citizens to alter or abolish these governments." The Declaration gave new impetus to African-Americans to get involved. It gave them hope that, should the new nation achieve its independence from Great Britain, they, too, might eventually win their freedom.

And so, during the American Revolution, thousands of African-Americans from all the thirteen original colonies fought alongside European-American patriots. Crispus Attucks, a forty-seven-year-old escaped slave, was the first person killed by English troops in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. A slave named Abel Benson helped wake the town of Needham, Massachusetts, by blowing his trumpet the same night as Paul Revere's famous ride. There were black Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. They were there with George Washington when he crossed the Delaware and took Trenton. And they fought at the battles of Breed's Hill, Monmouth Courthouse, Saratoga, Brandywine, Yorktown, and nearly all other major engagements. Many African-Americans who did not actually fight in combat helped in other ways. Some were spies and scouts. Others helped build roads or produced and transported supplies.

After the war, many states awarded freedom to those slaves who fought on the American side. Actually, both during and after the Revolution, a trend toward emancipation passed through the northern states, where the economy was not as dependent on slave labor. In 1777, for instance, the Vermont legislature became the first to abolish slavery. Pennsylvania and New York enacted legislation to gradually eliminate the institution. And, with time, the northern states began taking steps toward abolition. By 1790, all had prohibited the importation of slaves -- and Massachusetts had not a single slave left in the entire state. About the same time, the new United States Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in territories east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio River. As a consequence, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin were eventually admitted to the Union as free states.

In the southern region of the United States, however, it was an altogether different story. Most slaves who had participated in the rebellion on the side of America simply returned to their masters and remained in slavery. The institution not only remained strong in the South, but grew considerably as business expanded rapidly. Kentucky and Tennessee were admitted as slave states. Demand for cotton boomed, as did the demand for tobacco, rice, sugar, and other southern staples. It was an economy in which the institution of slavery became ingrained as a method to insure high profits through noncompensated labor.

By 1820 slavery was no longer a national establishment. It was a southern enterprise. Of the 1.5 million slaves in the United States, 99 percent resided in southern states and territories. The conditions in which they lived were abominable -- working from sunrise to sunset, living in small, crowded, and dilapidated shacks, with meager rations for sustenance. It was a crime to teach a slave to read or write. They were not permitted to possess Bibles. And they were admonished to think of themselves as inferior and helpless; to obey their masters without question. Slavery was a lifelong condition for millions of African-Americans with no hope that they, or even their children, would one day be free. The culture created by the southern majority was an increasingly downward spiral of oppression.

In the North, conditions were better because slavery was being phased out -- but not much better. Racial bias, prejudice, and segregation still remained in practice and in the minds of many European-Americans. Rapid growth in the number of free former slaves seemed only to increase racist views in the North. As such, African-Americans were confined to the lowest tier of society with low-paying jobs and all the accompanying social negatives. They were segregated and prohibited from participating in most societal functions controlled by the majority. The Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1793, allowed agents to seize any African-American they thought might be a slave. This law led to the widespread abuse of capturing free people in the North and then transporting them to the South to be sold into slavery. Those taken had no rights to appeal -- no trial by jury, no witnesses allowed to speak nor individual testimony on their own behalf. And the new United States Constitution had a provision that slaves could be counted as only three fifths of a human being for the purposes of calculating taxes and government representation.

In response, free African-Americans began to organize themselves into social groups and create a society and culture of their own design. As a matter of fact, post-Revolutionary War America brought a wave of African-American institution-building that lasted approximately forty years.

One month before the Constitutional Convention opened in 1787, the Free African Society was founded in Philadelphia. That event set off a chain reaction where fraternal lodges, schools, mutual aid and improvement societies, and various cultural organizations were also established. Colonization organizations for those who wished to return to Africa (though most did not wish to do so) were created. Also founded were wide-ranging correspondence networks (providing for the sharing of information and ideas) that served to link African-Americans geographically for the first time. And, perhaps most significantly because they touched people on a local and daily basis, various independent African-American churches came into existence. The church served as a center for social life and politics and parish preachers quickly became acknowledged leaders of the community.

In the North, workers organized demonstrations against segregation and discrimination policies. In the South, resistance to slavery produced individual instances of theft, destruction of property, trampling of crops, poor work performance, work slowdowns, and sit-downs. Many violent revolts also took place. There was one planned in Charleston in 1822 that would have involved nine thousand slaves had not informers alerted authorities. And in 1831, there was the now-famous revolt led by a slave named Nat Turner, who embarked on a rampage of killing and murder throughout Southampton County, Virginia. As before, such violence and disobedience resulted in more restrictive laws and harsher punishments in an attempt to quell resistance. Violators were whipped, burned at the stake, and hanged. Tougher laws were passed and enforced. The state of Maryland actually set up a law that promoted colonization of free blacks in Africa and authorized them to be deported if they did not leave voluntarily.

But still, the world seemed to be on a path toward the eventual elimination of involuntary servitude. Between 1810 and 1825, the fight for independence in the Spanish-held portion of the Americas eventually led to the total liberation of slaves in the resulting newly independent nations. On March 3, 1820, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Maine to the Union as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and banned slavery in the northern half of territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. In 1833, Great Britain abolished slavery. Fifteen years later, France followed suit. And in the United States of America, a fast-growing radical abolitionist movement emerged in the northern part of the nation.

Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (a former indentured servant) founded the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. In addition, political organizations (such as the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party) were formed to run abolitionist candidates for nationwide office.

Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave turned passionate abolitionist, also rose from the masses and, for more than half a century, led the fight for emancipation and equal rights under the law. He traveled the country and the world, preaching his abolitionist views and raising awareness of slavery's inhumanity to man. In fact, he was so well received in Europe that many people urged him to stay because he was better treated there than in his own country. In reply, Douglass said in 1847 to a group of London supporters:

I choose to go home; to return to America. I will go back, for the sake of my brethren. I go to suffer with them; to toil with them; to endure insult with them; to undergo outrage with them; to lift up my voice in their behalf; to speak and write in their vindication; and struggle in their ranks for that emancipation which shall yet be achieved by the power of truth and of principle for that oppressed people.

Back in the United States, Douglass and other black abolitionists created mass movements of protest on a nationwide basis. They held regional and local meetings, sang freedom songs, and marched in demonstrations. For the most part, they protested without violence in attempting to call attention to the inhumanity of slavery.

African-Americans also held a series of national conventions where strategy was debated, decisions made, and nationwide action agreed upon. Education and dissemination of information became a top priority. Freedom's Journal, the nation's first African-American newspaper, was founded. Many articles and pamphlets concerning events and conditions in black society were published. Several escaped slaves published autobiographies detailing the horror of their experiences. And the first detailed works chronicling the history of African-Americans appeared.

Formal education also became of paramount concern. The first African-American gained admittance to and subsequently graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1823. Others followed suit at such northern universities as Amherst, Bowdoin, Oberlin, and Rutland. And of special significance was the founding of the first all-African-American colleges in the 1840s and 1850s in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Washington, D.C.

African-Americans also renewed their fight within the court systems. A group of Boston abolitionists, for example, raised enough money to hire famed attorney Charles Sumner to plead a case regarding the unconstitutionality of segregated schools. So many demonstrations, sit-downs, and protests were held in the process that the Massachusetts state legislature, in 1849, finally outlawed school segregation. In addition, free African-Americans, like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, helped slaves escape to the North through an elaborate and shrewdly constructed "Underground Railroad."

Despite all the small victories and the hope created by the abolitionist movement, the vast majority of American citizens refused to accept slaves and former slaves as equals in society. As a consequence, the practice of segregation in the United States was greatly expanded. Hundreds of riots were instigated by European-Americans in opposition to the crusade for abolition and equal rights. And Jim Crow laws (named after a racial stereotype from a song-and-dance routine) became more common between 1830 and 1860. Segregation was formalized in nearly all public institutions in the North, including theaters, libraries, museums, schools, and modes of transportation, to name a few.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, the issue and status of slavery in the United States grew to primary and paramount importance in the quest for political power and determination of new territories being added to the Union. The Compromise of 1850, for instance, involved several bills adopted by Congress that abolished slavery in Washington, D.C.; admitted California as a free state; organized the New Mexico and Utah territories without restrictions on slavery; and enacted a new Fugitive Slave Law that strengthened the previous one of 1793. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened those new territories to settlement by slaveholders -- which led immediately to violence and bloodshed between abolitionists and pro-slavery activists.

But tensions between North and South grew to a fevered pitch when, in 1857, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Court essentially ruled that African-Americans, because they were "so far inferior, they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," were not considered citizens of the United States -- and therefore had no rights under the Constitution.

When Abraham Lincoln, a compromise candidate, was elected president of the United States in 1860 without even being on the ballot in most southern states, the South had had enough. Before Lincoln was sworn in, seven states seceded from the United States to form the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis was inaugurated in Montgomery, Alabama, as first president of the Confederacy. And within six months of Lincoln's inauguration, a total of eleven states had left the Union. When Confederate troops fired on the Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina -- a four-year war, the bloodiest in American history, began.

In short order, President Lincoln issued a call for volunteers, and thousands of free African-Americans in the North filled the recruiting stations. Later, in another effort to raise troops, Lincoln became the first president to institute the draft. But many European-American citizens in the North were enraged at the prospect of having to fight a war to free slaves. Lincoln's call for troops resulted in some of the worst race riots in American history. On July 12, 1863, for example, New York's draft rioters turned on any African-American they could find. Blacks were hunted down in the streets and shot or hanged. Women and children were thrown out of windows. New York's Colored Orphan Asylum was burned to the ground, as were businesses and private residences. And thousands of free citizens fled the city for their lives. The riots were a telling indication of just how deeply racism went in America's culture and consciousness.