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King and Gandhi
Monday was commemorated in the US as “Martin Luther King Day” in honour of the great reformer who championed the power of non-violent action (and even unconditional love even for one’s adversaries) as a way to fight injustice and defuse violent disputes. He was the son of a preacher who earned his own Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozier
Theological Seminary in 1951 and earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Boston University in 1955. His life is inspirational in many regards, not least being his quest as a very young man to arrive at a strategy to confront the inequities he witnessed in the American South being perpetuated on African Americans.
While at seminary, King became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent social protest.
Aware of the commonalities in the conditions of the Indians under colonialism and African-Americans under a system of law that kept them as second-class citizens, King closely followed the path followed by Gandhi that led to India being granted Independence in 1947. In 1958, on the 10th Anniversary of the assassination of Gandhi he wrote the following tribute to the Mahatma. It has great significance for us in Guyana today.
“Mahatma Gandhi has done more than any other person in history to reveal that social problems can be solved without resorting to primitive methods of violence. In this sense he is more than a saint of India. He belongs — as they said of Abraham Lincoln — to the ages. In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see, at a very early stage, that a synthesis of Gandhi’s method of nonviolence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity.
It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a continual reminder to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence. The Gandhian influence in some way still speaks to the conscience of the world as nations grapple with international problems. If we fail, on an international scale, to follow the Gandhian principle of nonviolence, we may end up by destroying ourselves through the misuse of our own instruments. The choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is now either nonviolence or non-existence.
I myself gained this insight from Gandhi. When I was in theological school, I thought the only way we could solve our problem of segregation was an armed revolt. I felt that the Christian ethic of love was confined to individual relationships. I could not see how it could work in social conflict.
Then I read Gandhi’s ethic of love as revealed in Jesus but raised to a social strategy for social transformation. This lifts love from individual relationships to the place of social transformation. This Gandhi helped us to understand, and for this we are grateful a decade after his death.”
On a trip to India in 1959 King met with followers of Gandhi. During these discussions he became more convinced than ever that non-violent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.
He was to put it into practice in his own short lifetime. Even though mocked by others such as Malcolm X, who felt power must be seized by “any means necessary”, King never wavered in his insistence that nonviolence must remain the central tactic of the civil-rights movement, or in his faith that everyone in America would someday attain equal justice. While America still has a ways to go towards the dream of Dr King, the election of Barack Obama as president of the USA has vindicated his non-violent approach.
On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated, as had been Gandhi. He was only 39 at the time of his death. Dr. King once said that we all have to decide whether we “will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness.” It is a decision we have to make in Guyana today.
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