King recollects various stories from Gandhi’s life: his birth and upbringing, his time in South Africa, and his three-decade-long struggle for freedom in India. King admires Gandhi’s discipline and his ability for internal criticism. He shares Gandhi’s work fighting for the untouchables of India, those who most closely understood the plight of Black America. Having just returned from India, King also shares with his congregation personal reflections on India, a decade after Gandhi was assassinated.
At a dinner one night with India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the wife of the last viceroy of India, Edwina Mountbatten, King witnessed a “lasting friendship” between Indians and the English. This lasting friendship, King believes, is the greatest legacy of Gandhi’s work. It is the highest form of a litmus test for the practitioner of nonviolent social change: the abiding friendship and fellowship between once rivals. King says:
The aftermath of violence is always bitterness; the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community so that when the battle is over, it’s over, and a new love and a new understanding and a new relationship comes into being between oppressed and the oppressor.
King closes his sermon with a prayer, acknowledging the different names of the one who King calls “gracious Heavenly Father”: “some call Thee Allah; some call you Elohim; some call you Jehovah; some call you Brahma; and some call you the Unmoved Mover; some call you the Archetectonic Good. But we know that these are all names for one and the same God, and we know you are one.”
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Two months after the three hundred eighty-one-day Montgomery Bus Boycott began, King’s home was bombed. Neither he nor his wife and six-month-old were injured, but local Blacks were eager and armed to retaliate. King spoke clearly to the gathered crowd, his first public proclamation of non-violence: “If you have weapons, take them home. If you do not have them, please do not seek them. We cannot solve this problem through violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. Love your enemies; bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you. Remember this movement will not stop, because God is with it.”
King’s exposure to nonviolence and disobedience began early in his life. To be religious and Black in the American South meant to be confronted with discrimination, forcing a conflict between the Christian duty to love your enemies with a system of oppression opposed to living a free life and making impossible a life free from violence.
At six, King was told by the father of a white friend he could no longer play with his son. The sudden loss of a playmate is disorienting to a child, and the tragic explanation given to King - the same explanation given to Black and Brown children today - led him to a desire to hate white people.
These feelings were confirmed and deepened with other incidents. Being asked to purchase shoes at the back of the store. Witnessing his father, who he revered, be called a boy by law enforcement. At the age of eight, without provocation, the young King was slapped in the face by a white woman in a downtown store. Sometimes these insults were received without confrontation, yet often enough a model of force and resistance was presented, giving the impressionable King an example of non-cooperation. “I don’t care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it,” his father told him.
Yet racism plants anger in the hearts of the oppressor and the oppressed, and the constant barrage of insults took root in King. He grew angry realizing his capacities and hard work was outweighed by the unjust laws of the land. This anger deepened as he saw economic opportunity and racial injustice were intertwined at the root and at the abject violence co-signed by the state in support of the Ku Klux Klan and a color biased judicial and penal system. From this anger grew a righteous rage.
When King enrolled in Morehouse College at the age of fifteen (after having skipped two grades, an attempt to keep up with his older sister), his education on race and evolution toward nonviolence began in earnest. His father (and maternal grandfather) previously attended Morehouse. During this time, King turned to the choice of ministry as a means of service. As he puts it in his autobiography, “My father is a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher, my only brother is a preacher, my daddy's brother is a preacher. So I didn't have much choice.”
Personal relationships like those developed with Morehouse school president Benjamin Mays proved life-long and helped guide King towards Gandhian non-violence. While attending Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, King heard a lecture by Mordecai Johnson, the first Black president of Howard University. King described this lecture as “so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.” By the time he arrived for his doctorate studies at Boston University in 1953, he was prepared to learn more. Lucky for him, the perfect mentor was already there.
Howard Thurman was an early twentieth-century Christian theologian and mystic. At the time of King’s doctorate program, Thurman was the Professor of Spiritual Resources and Disciplines in the School of Theology and Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Thurman had attended Morehouse College with Martin Luther King, Sr. and knew the younger King well. King was perhaps familiar and influenced by Thurman through his book, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” a well-known 1948 publication. Soon after he arrived in Boston, Thurman began indoctrinating the young King to the virtues and practices of Gandhian nonviolence.
Thurman had become familiar with Gandhian nonviolence decades earlier, when in 1935, he led a Pilgrimage of Friendship, traveling to India, Burma and Ceylon. At the time Thurman was the dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University in Washington, DC. The four-month trip ended with Thurman and his group meeting with Gandhi for a long conversation, the first meeting between Gandhi and African-Americans. At the time, Thurman was probably one of the few Westerners able to engage with Gandhi about spiritual philosophy, and the practical application of spiritual laws to earthly life. In this sense, Thurman served as a translator for Gandhi’s work in India and its use in the United States. The meeting ended with a final message from Gandhi to Thurman and later King: “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”
This “unadulterated message of nonviolence” would be delivered through the booming eloquence and fierce determination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Long before Howard Thurman, Gandhi communicated with Black America, provided ‘‘the guiding light of [the] technique of nonviolent social change.’’ From the philosophical conception of satyagraha to the practical application in meetings, boycotts, and protests, Gandhi’s early freedom work in South Africa was reported by Black newspapers in America, as early as the 1920s. In 1929, a message from Gandhi was shared in W.E.B. Du Bois’ circulation, The Crisis, in which he wrote:
Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is no dishonor in being slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners. But let us not think of honor or dishonor in connection with the past. Let us realize that the future is with those who would be truthful, pure, and loving. For, as the old wise men have said, truth ever is, untruth never was. Love along binds and truth and love accrue only to the truly humble.
Just as King came out of a family legacy of preaching and Christian service, the Civil Rights movement was born out of many generations of struggle, resistance, and rebellion. Black freedom fighters in the United States looked for inspiration from other freedom fighters around the world and built alliances through messages of solidarity and support.
In this way, the well-known influence of Gandhi on Dr. King is one link in a long chain of connections. This chain connects across ideas of race, gender, nationhood, and faith. It is a connection that promotes freedom, equality, and a shared fate of humanity. While Dr. King’s work in the world was informed by Gandhi’s teachings and examples, he also learned from his contemporaries. Bayard Rustin and James Lawson, both of who traveled to India in the late 1940s to learn from Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, provided continued tutelage. (Rustin once warned reporter Bill Worthy, during a visit to King’s home: “Watch out, Bill, there’s a gun on that chair” avoiding a potential disastrous scene.) Many leaders of the Civil Rights movement carried a copy of a book called “War Without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its Accomplishments,” written by Krishnalal Shridharani, who first worked and learned from Gandhi during India’s Freedom Struggle. From 1934-1946, Shridharani studied and lived in the United States where he met members of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.), an early influencer in the U.S. Civil Rights movement. There was a deep and nuanced history that preceded Dr. King and the flag bearers of American freedom.
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By 1965, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Dr. King expanded his work, his first step to linking the racism he experienced in the South to the economic conditions in places like Chicago to the endless war produced by his government. As he stepped beyond the narrow concerns of his race to the broader health of humanity, he was encouraged by a man he would later call “an apostle of peace and nonviolence.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, born Nguyễn Xuân Bảo in Vietnam, entered the monastery at the age of sixteen, where he devoted himself to studies of “a grandiose cosmology, often complex ritualism, paradoxical metaphysics, and universal ethics.” He became ordained as a monk in 1945. The everpresent Vietnam War -- the ongoing destruction of his people and land through warfare and constant bombings, the attempted dominance of another colonial power, and a decades-long independence struggle -- brought Thich Nhat Hanh out of the temple. He could not sit in the temple while his country was under attack. He carried his practice of compassion and loving-kindness to his countrymen and women. He knew all people, Americans and Vietnamese alike, suffered from the bombing of his homeland. In taking his practice of meditation into the world, Thich Nhat Hanh evolved a nearly two thousand old tradition, coining his reform “Engaged Buddhism.”
He opened the Phuong Boi (Fragrant Palm Leaves) Meditation Center in 1955, and started an organization called the School of Youth for Social Service in 1957, which “established schools, built healthcare clinics and helped rebuild villages.” By 1961, when he traveled to the United States to study and teach at Columbia and Princeton University, he, like King, was on the way to becoming an enemy of the state, a threat to his government for organizing and advocating for peace and protection of his homeland. In 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh would be banished from his own country, spending thirty-nine years exiled in France.
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