Enabling Leadership: Whitney Young, Jr. as Dramaturgical Director of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) recently advanced a nascent complexity leadership framework of leadership for organizational adaptability. Within their integrative meta-theory, they made a compelling argument for the recognition of the concept of enabling leadership as a critical form of leadership for adaptive organizations. Enabling leadership requires the social facilitation of ideological tensions to engender the adaptive space needed for new understandings to emerge within the rich interconnectivity of complexity. To further explore how leaders enable adaptive processes, Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) called for future research using in-depth case studies of social actors centered on emergence in complex environments. During archival research of Whitney Young, Jr.’s largely overlooked and misunderstood leadership in the historic social drama of the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement, we discovered evidence to support and extend their theoretical arguments. Accordingly, using a relational leadership-as-practice lens, we interpret the dramaturgical performance Young directed to facilitate coherent emancipatory dialogue, affect the social construction of power relations, and enable the adaptive space needed for social transformation to emerge.