Leading Change in Multiple Contexts

Concepts and Practices in Organizational, Community, Political, Social, and Global Change Settings

Gill Robinson Hickman

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412926782, 9781412926775
• eBook ISBN: 9781452276786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The first book to bring together both leadership and change theories, concepts, and processes, Leading Change in Multiple Contexts uses a consistent framework and the latest research to help readers understand and apply the concepts and practices of leading change.

Key Features

Brings together leadership and change concepts and practices in five distinct contexts—organizational, community, political, social change, and global

Draws from a wide range of classic and recent scholarship from multiple disciplines

Includes the perspectives of change and leadership experts

Offers real-life vignettes that provide examples of leading change in every context

Provides readers with application and reflection exercises that allow them to apply leadership and change concepts to their experiences

Leading Change in Multiple Contexts is designed for undergraduate and graduate courses in Change Management, Leadership, Organizational Behavior, Organizational Development, and Leadership and Change offered in departments of business, education, communication, and public administration, as well as programs focusing on leadership, public policy, community activism, and social change.

PART I

Conceptual Perspectives on Leading Change

Introduction

Prior to writing this book, I participated with several leadership scholars in a project known as the General Theory of Leadership (GTOL), led by James MacGregor Burns, George (Al) Goethals, and Georgia Sorenson. Our mission, as conceived by Burns, was to develop an integrative theory of leadership—in his words, “to provide people studying or practicing leadership with a general guide or orientation—a set of principles that are universal which can be then adapted to different situations” (Managan, 2002). Though the group did not produce a general theory of leadership, at the conclusion of the project “the members of the group decided that the most productive way to proceed was to create a volume of essays designed to capture, to the best of our ability, the nuances of 3 years of scholarly debate and discussion” (Wren, 2006, p. 34). This effort resulted in a book titled The Quest for a General Theory of Leadership (referred to as the Quest) (Goethals & Sorenson, 2006).

Congruent with my scholarship and teaching interests, and in anticipation of writing Leading Change in Multiple Contexts, I worked with a group (consisting of Richard Couto, Fredric Jablin, and myself) that would write the Quest chapter on change. The greater part of that chapter is included in this introduction to provide the conceptual perspective from which I consider leading change.¹ As indicated by the Quest editors, this perspective:

take[s] issue with the “Newtonian, mechanistic and old science” view of a leader or leaders initiating change and instead offer[s] a complex net of co-arising historical, economic, group and environmental factors that ebb and flow, push and pull, to collectively birth change. Using a constructionist approach [the view that humans construct or create reality and give it meaning through social, economic and political interactions] as opposed to an essentialist one [the view that social and natural realties exist apart from our perceptions of reality and that individuals perceive the world rather than construct it], they deftly demonstrate the interpenetrating and complex nature of leadership in action. (Goethals & Sorenson, 2006, p. xvii)

This viewpoint does not presume that “conditions change merely because a group of people wants them to change. … social reality is subject to historical conditions that can either foster or hinder change beyond any single person’s or group’s ability to effect change” (Hickman & Couto, 2006, p. 153).

The next section presents a vignette from the early civil rights movement in the United States and describes the actions taken by Barbara Rose Johns and the student leaders at Moton High School in protest of injustices committed by Prince Edward County Virginia School Board officials. The analysis that follows identifies and examines elements that contributed to change in this case, with the hope of illuminating elements that may be useful for understanding change across contexts.

Note

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1. I wish to thank Wang Fang for her recommendation concerning this chapter.

References

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Goethals, G. R., & Sorenson, G. L. J. (Eds.). (2006). The quest for a general theory of leadership. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Hickman, G. R., & Couto, R. A. (2006). Causality, change, and leadership. In G. R. Goethals & G. L. J. Sorenson (Eds.), The quest for a general theory of leadership (pp. 152–187). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Managan, K. (2002, May 31). Leading the way in leadership: The unending quest of the discipline’s founding father, James MacGregor Burns. Chronicle of Higher Education, 48(38), A10–12. Retrieved October 26, 2008, from http://newman.richmond.edu:2511/hww/results/results
_single_ftPES.jhtml

Wren, J. T. (2006). Introduction. In Goethals, G. R. & Sorenson, G. L. J. (Eds.), The quest for a general theory of leadership (p. 34). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

CHAPTER 1

Causality, Change, and Leadership

Gill Robinson Hickman and Richard A. Couto

Barbara Rose Johns

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As a junior at Robert R. Moton High School in Farmville, the county seat of Prince Edward County, Virginia, Barbara Rose Johns knew that the segregated, all-Black school that she attended in 1951 was separate but certainly not equal. She saw the same markers of inequality familiar to African American school children and their parents throughout the South at the time: textbooks handed down from the White students and, most of all, overcrowded facilities. In Johns’s case, a school built in 1939 to serve 180 students instead housed 450 students. The school accommodated some of the overflow students in three buildings hastily erected in 1949. Built of 2 × 4s, plywood, and tar paper, they were dubbed “shacks” or “chicken coops.”

At the constant prodding of the Moton PTA and its president, the Reverend L. Francis Griffin, pastor of the First Baptist Church, the all-White school board offered regular assurances but no action on a new high school for African American children. Progress slowed and the assurances became so broad that in April 1951, the school board suggested that the Moton High School PTA not come back to the school board’s meetings. Johns shared her concerns about the poor facilities and her frustration with the board’s delaying tactics with her favorite teacher, Inez Davenport. Davenport replied, “Why don’t you do something about it?”

So Johns did. During a 6-month period she enlisted student leaders a few at a time to take action themselves. Finally on April 23, 1951, following the PTA’s failed efforts, the students put their plans in motion. They started by luring M. Boyd Jones, the African American principal of the school, away from the premises with a false alarm about students making trouble at the bus station. He had received such complaints before and was anxious to put a stop to whatever was going on. As soon as he left, Johns and the other student leaders sent a forged note to every classroom calling for a school assembly at 11:00 a.m.

When the students and teachers arrived in the auditorium, the stage curtain opened on Johns and other student strike leaders. She asked the two dozen teachers to leave, and most of them did. She then laid out the already well-known grievances and said that it was time for the students to take matters into their own hands by striking. No one was to go to class. If they stuck together, she explained, the Whites would have to respond. Nothing would happen to them, because the jail was not big enough to hold all of them. Principal Jones returned to school to find the student assembly in full swing. He pleaded with the students not to strike and explained that progress on the new school was being made. Johns asked him to go back to his office, and he did.

Flush with their initial success, the student strike committee asked Rev. Griffin to come to the school that afternoon and give them some advice. They asked him if the students should ask their parents’ permission to strike. The African American adult population in Prince Edward County was “docile” in the view of Rev. Griffin, who had spent time trying to organize an NAACP chapter in the county. He suggested that the matter be put to a vote, which ultimately determined that the students should proceed without getting their parents’ approval. At Griffin’s urging, Johns and Carrie Stokes, student body president, wrote a letter to the NAACP attorneys in Richmond asking for their assistance.

The next afternoon the strike committee met with the superintendent of schools, T. J. McIlwaine, who was serving a fourth decade in that position. He represented the softer side of Jim Crow—accepting things as they were and doing his best to be fair and evenhanded in a system of injustice and oppression. At the meeting, the opposing sides hardened their stances. McIlwaine insisted on African American subordination and made numerous promises—assuring the students that much had already been done and that more would be done in time. He also previewed a gauntlet of reprisals—warning the students that unless they went back to class, the teachers and the principal would lose their jobs. The students left dismayed by McIlwaine’s elusive and evasive manner but encouraged by their performance in the confrontation. They had held their own in the face of White power.

On Wednesday, 2 days into the strike, NAACP attorneys Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson III came by to talk with the strike leaders and their supporters in response to the letter they had received from the students. Both Hill and Robinson were high-profile civil rights lawyers who regularly engaged in lawsuits. They had studied at Howard University, a training ground for advocacy lawyers, and had joined the network of African American lawyers working to redress racial inequality across the country. On the state and national level, the premise of the NAACP’s advocacy had been that as long as Plessy v. Ferguson was the law of the land, the government had to make equal what it insisted remain separate. They had already won several lawsuits for equal pay and facilities around the state of Virginia. Hill had even won a case for equal salaries for Prince Edward County teachers before World War II.

Hill and Robinson were not encouraging on this day, however. They and other NAACP members had grown tired of equalization suits, which although plentiful, only succeeded in changing the subordination of African Americans teachers and students at the margins. They were interested in shifting their strategy to confront school desegregation directly and were paying close attention to a case from Clarendon County, South Carolina, that was moving toward the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, when Hill and Robinson stopped to speak to the Farmville student strike organizers, they were en route to Pulaski County, Virginia, to determine if the plaintiffs in a case there were willing to transform their suit from equalization to desegregation. They counseled the students to go back to class.

The students, however, were adamant in their refusal to end the strike. Impressed by their determination and not wanting to dampen their spirits, Hill and Robinson offered to help if the students would agree to return to school and change their case from one of equalization to one of desegregation.

The next evening, April 26, 1,000 students and parents attended a mass meeting in Farmville. The secretary of the state NAACP urged the parents to support their children. Without parental support, he said, the NAACP would not initiate what it knew would be a long, hard suit that would require considerable endurance. Initial assessments suggested that 65% of parents supported the students and the NAACP intervention; 25% opposed it; and 10% had no opinion. No opponents spoke that night.

On April 30, the school board sent out a letter signed by Principal Jones, urging parents to send their children back to school. The strange wording, which stated that Jones and the staff “had been authorized by the division superintendent” to send the letter, suggested that Jones was acting under duress. Rev. Griffin, however appreciative of Jones’s difficult position, nevertheless understood that the principal’s prestige and authority could influence many parents to change or waver in their support of the strike and court action. Consequently, Griffin sent out his own letter calling for another mass meeting on Thursday, May 3, and underscoring the significance of what the students were trying to accomplish: “REMEMBER. The eyes of the world are on us. The intelligent support we give our cause will serve as a stimulant for the cause of free people everywhere” (Smith, 1965/1996, p. 58). John Lancaster, Negro county farm agent, helped Griffin get out the mass mailing.

On May 3 Hill and Robinson petitioned the school board for the desegregation of the county’s schools. The meeting that night took the form of a rally and served as a real turning point. J. B. Pervall, the former principal of Moton High School, spoke in favor of the standard of equality but not integration and gave many people in the packed church reason to pause and reassess what they were supporting. The NAACP officials attempted to regain the momentum, but it was Barbara Johns who succeeded in restoring the crowd’s support. She reminded members of the audience of their experience and the students’ action. In concluding, she effectively recounted the many small and large insults suffered by African Americans in the history of race relations, challenging Pervall with unmistakable metaphors of White oppression and Black accommodation to it. She admonished the huge gathering: “Don’t let Mr. Charlie, Mr. Tommy, or Mr. Pervall stop you from backing us. We are depending on you” (Smith, 1965/1996, p. 59). Rev. Griffin took the cue and asserted Pervall’s right to speak but implied cowardice of anyone who would not match the students’ courage and back them. The students consented to return to school on Monday, May 7. Hill and Robinson promised that they would file suit in federal court unless the school board agreed to integrate by May 8.

The Walkout Becomes a Federal Case

On May 23, one month after the strike, Robinson followed through on the NAACP’s promise in light of the board’s inaction and filed suit in federal court in Richmond, Virginia, on behalf of 117 Moton students. In Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County he argued that Virginia’s law requiring segregated schools be struck down as unconstitutional. The attorney general, looking at the facts, counseled that an equalization suit was indefensible for the state but integration was too radical a remedy. The state immediately began improving the facilities in an effort to render the suit moot.

The prestigious Richmond law firm Hunton, Williams, Anderson, Gay, & Moore represented the school board. Two senior partners, Archibald Gerard Robertson and Justin Moore, prepared a vigorous defense of segregation. During the 5-day trial, which began on February 25, 1952, they argued a very familiar defense of poor facilities for African American children: to each according to the taxes that they pay. The poverty of African Americans meant a low tax base among them and thus a generous White subsidy of their schools.

Robinson and Hill presented a now-familiar cast of witnesses who discussed the psychological impact of segregation. Moore rebutted one witness for the plaintiffs specifically for his Jewish background and the others for their unfamiliarity with the mores of the South. Moore ridiculed educator and psychologist Kenneth B. Clark for his research methods and overreaching conclusions. During Moore’s cross-examination of Clark, Moore and Hill clashed vehemently—and just short of physically—over Moore’s contention that the NAACP and Hill himself stirred up and fomented critical situations. The passions of this exchange portended events to come.

The court found unanimously for the school board. The students and their parents were disappointed, given their honest, albeit idealistic, belief that they would win because their cause was just. Robinson and Hill were neither surprised nor disappointed; they were now prepared to appeal to higher courts. Davis v. School Board reached the Supreme Court in July and joined with other school desegregation cases for argument on December 8, 1952.

The drama of a local school strike reaching the U.S. Supreme Court was not over, although many of the original actors in the school strike had exited the stage. Barbara Rose Johns left Farmville soon after the strike. Her family, concerned for her safety, sent her to Montgomery, Alabama, to live with her uncle Rev. Vernon Johns, minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The education board fired Boyd Jones, and he and his new wife, Moton High School teacher Inez Davenport, also moved to Montgomery so he could attend graduate school. Ironically, the couple became members of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

The arguments of December left the Court with the task of deciding the legality of school desegregation and possibly the constitutionality of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that found separate but equal to be constitutional. A divided Court, with at least two dissenting votes, was ready to overturn Plessy but sought a stronger majority. Ju...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Brief Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I. CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES ON LEADING CHANGE
• PART II. LEADING CHANGE IN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXTS
• PART III. LEADING COMMUNITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
• PART IV. LEADING POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE
• PART V. LEADING GLOBAL CHANGE
• Epilogue: Leading Intellectual Change: The Power of Ideas
• Index
• About the Author
• About the Contributors