Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.: Champions of a Nonviolent World

- By Walter Earl Fluker

Nearly forty years ago, at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, a weary and wounded Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a capacity crowd on the eve of his assassination. Despite storm warnings these people had come to hear him speak; and he, despite other warnings of death threats on his life, had come to rehearse the old dream that he had heard from his forebearers about a new land of freedom and harmony among the peoples of the earth. That fateful evening, with moving oratory and in a panoramic flight of the imagination, he took a poetic excursion through the history of Western civilization. He traveled with the Almighty from the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt across the Red Sea (but he wouldn't stop there); he journeyed through the great Hellenistic Period where he contemplated the lofty and eternal ideas of reality with Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle and all the classical philosophers of Greece (but he wouldn't stop there); he paused at the great heyday of Roman civilization and made note of the developments in law and science that would shape the future of the Euro - western world (but he wouldn't stop there); he reflected on the richness of the cultural and aesthetic contributions of the Renaissance (but he wouldn't stop there); he stood over the shoulders of a vacillating president named Abraham Lincoln and witnessed the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation (but he wouldn't stop there); he sat in sympathetic appreciation of a president struggling with the trials of the Great Depression (but he wouldn't stop there); and finally, he arrived in the latter half of the twentieth century. He said that if he had opportunity to live in any of these respective eras, he would have asked the Almighty to let him live in this particular period of history He said he was pleased to live during this chaotic and precarious age because he believed that this was a great moment for the revelation of God's purposes in the world. King said:

I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding—something is happening in our world. The masses of the people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee—the cry is always the same—"We want to be free."¹

So, with wearied brow and the premonition of death surrounding him, in his last public sentences, he, like the prophets and seers of old, spoke of a vision, which is as old as human strivings and embraces a reality that comes from the future. He said:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.²

The Vision of the Promised Land

It is important to note that King's vision of the Promised Land was an evolutionary ideal. It did not emerge out of an historical vacuum; rather it arose from a rich and vibrant tradition of protest of which he was its most noble heir. It began long before he was catapulted into national and international fame after the Montgomery bus boycott, long before he stood before the Lincoln Memorial and declared to a pilgrimage of thousands that America had written its citizens of color a bad check that had come back marked "insufficient funds." It began long before his campaigns for open public accommodations and voting rights, long before his outspoken stance on an unjust war in Vietnam. His dream was born in the violent context of the Deep South where the inseparable twins of white racism and economic injustice had relegated Black people to the status of things, non - persons without names and destinies. The dream of community which sent him forth into the segregated south and into the teeming ghettoes of the urban North was nurtured by a deep sense of mission and purpose that was the rich legacy of his enslaved forebearers and the long, torturous struggle of brave men and women who had come before him and who refused to believe that equality and decency were the special birthrights of sex, color and class.

Indeed, the vision of King was enriched by his intellectual odyssey through Morehouse College, the cloistered halls of Crozer Theological Seminary, Boston and Harvard Universities; but it was deepened by his discovery of the philosophy of civil disobedience articulated by Henry David Thoreau and the nonviolent method of Mahatma Gandhi.

On 17 May 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled unanimously in Brown vs. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The high court's ruling precipitated a climate of "interposition," "nullification," economic reprisals, and violence against black people led by White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan from Virginia to Texas.³ In December of that same year, King became the spokesperson for the Montgomery Improvement Association, a position that placed him in the practical arena of social action where his developing understanding of the nature of community and the method for its actualization would be tested in the praxis of struggle. The able leadership of King as spokesman for the Montgomery Improvement Association, which came into being after Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white man, ushered in a new era not only for the Montgomery black community, but for the continuing civil rights movement throughout the country. King felt that the movement in Montgomery was divinely inspired and that God was using Montgomery "as the proving ground for the struggle and triumph of freedom and justice in America."⁴

King's ministry in the Montgomery Movement was characterized by two significant realizations that became working hypotheses in his future campaigns to achieve the beloved community: his practical realization of the method of nonviolent resistance as the means to achieve his vision of community and the power of the federal government to combat the barriers to community imposed by segregated statutes and unjust laws.⁵

Nonviolent Direct Action as the Method

In Montgomery, King realized the power of nonviolent resistance to achieve his vision of community; the black church was the place which served as the source of its inspiration. Lerone Bennett contends that King's great achievement in reference to nonviolent resistance

was to turn the Negro's rooted faith in the church to social and political account by melding the image of Gandhi and the image of the Negro preacher and by overlaying all with Negro songs and symbols that bypassed cerebral centers and exploded in the well of the Negro psyche.⁶

Before Montgomery, his understanding of nonviolence was confined to an abstract association of ideas and readings from his intellectual pursuits, but in the midst of the struggle he came to understand its power to effect change, both in society and within the votary him/herself. It is also important to understand that nonviolent resistance as a viable alternative for social change had been debated and attempted by the black leadership long before King emerged as a proponent of the method.⁷ Initially, the method of the movement which came to be called nonviolent resistance was conceived in the hearts of the black people of Montgomery as "Christian love." King writes that:

From the beginning a basic philosophy guided the movement.... It was the Sermon on the Mount rather than a doctrine of passive resistance that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.⁸

The inspiration of Gandhi was to exert its influence through the letter of Miss Juliette Morgan to the Montgomery Advertiser, and later through the help of several Christian socialists and pacifists who collaborated with King as he fashioned a philosophy of nonviolence for the Montgomery Improvement Association.⁹ He says:

Nonviolent resistance had emerged as the technique of the movement, while love stood out as the regulating ideal. In other words, Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.¹⁰

The philosophy of nonviolent resistance was disseminated in the mass meetings held in the black churches throughout the city. King felt that the black church was the natural place for this idea to be taught because of the long history of redemptive suffering that black people had endured. After Montgomery, he believed that American Negroes had been chosen by history to become "instruments of a great idea," the idea of nonviolent resistance.¹¹

Howard Washington Thurman and Mahatma Gandhi

An important connection in the relationship between Gandhi and King is the Reverend Howard Thurman (1899 - 1981). Thurman's career as pastor, scholar, teacher, university chaplain, preacher; and administrator extended over fifty - five years and touched the lives of many highly visible leaders within and beyond the modern Civil Rights Movement.¹² Born in Daytona Beach, Florida at the turn of the century in the midst of the dehumanizing onslaughts of segregation and Jim Crow, Thurman committed himself to transforming parochial and dogmatic pockets of organized religion into a community transcending barriers of racism, classism, sexism, denominationalism, and religious exclusivism.

The India Delegation: A Pilgrimage of Friendship

An epochal event in Howard Thurman's life was his participation in the Negro Delegation to India, Ceylon, and Burma in 1935 and 1936. Thurman served as chairman of the Delegation, and other members included Sue Bailey Thurman, the Rev. Edward G. Carroll,¹³ and his wife Phenola Carroll.¹⁴ The four members formed the "Pilgrimage of Friendship" to India, Ceylon, and Burma. They arrived in Colombo, Ceylon on 21 October 1935 and spent over four months in South Asia, delivering over 250 addresses before departing Ceylon on 8 March 1936. Much of the documentary evidence about the Delegation's journey, from its creation and planning through to its activities in South Asia, still survive.

The tour of the Negro Delegation highlighted a new urgency by the International Student Christian Movement of the need for international Christian enterprise to deal forthrightly with the issues of racism and colonialism. By the 1920s, there was a liberal Protestant critique of the missionary enterprise, which argued that the identification of the Christian message with the western and colonial powers was greatly reducing its scope.¹⁵ The new emphasis on race within the Student Christian Movement was in part reflected by a new prominence of African Americans within the movement.

There had long been an interest by African Americans in India. By the mid - 19th century, Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists railed against the practice of the "caste system" in the United States. African American Christians had been a presence in India at least since the 1880s, when the Fisk Jubilee Singers had an extensive Asian concert tour. The prominent Methodist Episcopal missionary Amanda Berry Smith, born a slave in Maryland, spent several years in India on a successful preaching mission. In the twentieth century, the interest in India was greatly heightened by the rise of Mahatma Gandhi as the charismatic leader of India's independence effort.¹⁶ In an account of her 1928 visit to India, Juliette Dericotte regretted her inability to arrange a meeting with Gandhi.¹⁷ For his part, Gandhi published a special message "To the American Negro" in The Crisis in 1929, in which he was introduced by W.E.B. DuBois as "the greatest colored man in the world."¹⁸ In Ralla Ram's talk at Spelman College, he told his audience that "Gandhi's outlook and plans for action are identical in tone and purpose with those set forth by Christ—so certainly alike that many think of him as a second corporate Christ, the living spirit of Christianity."¹⁹

Meeting with Gandhi

In many ways the highlight on the tour of the Negro Delegation was the meeting with Mahatma Gandhi on 21 February 1936. The interview with Gandhi and the Delegation, published in Gandhi's English weekly Harijan²⁰ on 14 March 1936, has been reprinted in part several times, but never in its entirety.²¹ Gandhi's campaigns against British colonial rule brought world - wide fame, and he was widely revered among African Americans as the most prominent non - white critic of imperialism and racism.²² The meeting between Gandhi and the Negro Delegation had been anticipated since shortly after the announcement of the tour in early 1934. In October 1934, a close associate of Gandhi, Madeline Slade, spoke at Howard University in October 1934 at Thurman's invitation.²³ As Thurman recounted their conversation in his autobiography, she told Thurman, "you must see Gandhiji²⁴ while you are there" and she promised to help arrange an interview.²⁵ After her meeting with Thurman in January 1935, Muriel Lester, another close associate of Gandhi, also said she would contact Gandhi on his behalf. On 9 September 1935, Thurman wrote Gandhi directly, telling him of his meetings with Slade and Lester, and requesting a meeting. To Thurman's delight, there was a postcard from Gandhi waiting for him on his arrival in Ceylon, a month later, inviting the Delegation to meet with him.

According to a 1948 sermon Thurman delivered shortly after Gandhi's assassination, Gandhi had invited the Delegation to spend the Christmas holidays at his ashram in Wardha, but his illness prevented this, as it prevented the plan for them to meet in Delhi in February.²⁶ According to his autobiography, while in Bombay Thurman met a representative of Gandhi, and invited him to meet with him at Bardoli.²⁷ If other arrangements proved impossible, Gandhi offered to come to Bombay to meet with the delegation. Thurman promptly cancelled all scheduled appearances and Thurman, Sue Bailey Thurman, and Edward Carroll (Phenola Carroll was still recovering from scarlet fever), left to meet Gandhi. After a train trip of three hours, they arrived at Navsari Station at about four o'clock a.m. on February 21st, where Desai met them. They went to a mango grove, and while Sue Bailey Thurman and Edward Carroll rested in a bungalow, Thurman and Desai spoke of Gandhi. At daybreak, they traveled the 20 miles to Bardoli.

Gandhi met the Delegation with great warmth. Thurman related in his memoirs that "to my amazement, the first thing Gandhi did was to reach under his shawl and take out an old watch, saying, "I apologize, but we must talk by the watch, because we have much to talk about and you have only three hours before you have to leave to take your train back to Bombay."²⁸ One possible reason for Gandhi's excitement was this was his first meeting with prominent African Americans, after many years of his interest in the civil rights struggles in the United States. Thurman recounts in his memoirs that never in his life had he been examined in such a persistent fashion about the history and current realities of African Americans. Gandhi wanted to know, according to Thurman, "about voting rights, lynching, discrimination, public school education, the churches and how they functioned. His questions covered the entire sweep of our experience in American society."²⁹ The delegation also asked a number of questions, with Sue Bailey Thurman asking many of the most probing questions.

The meeting of the Negro Delegation with Gandhi was extensively covered in the black press in the United States, and the interview became fairly well known in America.³⁰ The news of the interview traveled fast. Gandhi's final comment to Thurman in "With Our Negro Guests," that "it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non - violence will be delivered to the world," took on a life of its own, and soon became a watchword in the civil rights movement, remembered and quoted at critical times.³¹

King was a product of this tradition and it is within this context that we best understand him and the nature and significance of his vision for us. It would be a fatal error to simply understand King as an isolated genius who created out of nothingness the powerful vision of universal peoplehood. Much to the contrary, if we are going to really do justice to this twentieth century American prophet, we must forever keep in mind that the dream which he lived and died for is not the unique property of any individual, race, or nationality; rather it is the ongoing story of dispossessed and disinherited people of every color and every clan on this globe who have had to deal with the madness of Western supremacy.

Near the end of his life, the dream of King went beyond the crusade for civil rights and entered into the arena of human rights. His vision of justice and freedom had evolved from a national to an international perspective. His insistence that the triplets of oppression (racism, poverty, and war) were the inevitable products of the violence, which possess this nation, levied a high cost on his stature as a national leader. It cost him dearly. The "American Dream" that he talked about in 1963 had become the "American Nightmare" for him by 1968. The F.B.I., labeled him as the most dangerous political threat to the government. The later King, of 1966 to 1968—contrary to some misinformed commentators – was not a "moderate" but a radical visionary who called for the reconstruction of American society. Shortly before his death he had laid plans to stage a campaign of massive civil disobedience in the nation’s capital that would demand that the government respond to the overwhelming needs of poor people of all races and clans in this country. His was the first "rainbow coalition." This dream cost him dearly He - paid with his life.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This understanding of the radical nature of the dreams of Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi will make some people uneasy, especially those who are content to see "business as usual." As the United States is knee deep in a costly war in Iraq, feverishly negotiating a way out of a potential holocaust in North and South Korea, witnessing the remarkable economic growth of China and India with its concomitant challenges of poverty, illiteracy, and class divisions, and agonizingly monitoring the ongoing crisis between Israel and Palestine, the vision of the beloved community of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the world of peace and justice envisioned by Gandhi, are no longer the distant imaginings of Utopian dreamers, but may be the only viable option for peaceful co-existence on this planet. Today citizens of the world are asking whether this dream of nonviolence and peace has a chance. But if we are to be true to their vision, if we really believe that negotiation and peaceful resolution are better options than war, then it is important that we understand that their dream is not one for sentimentalists and "pop patriots." It is not an isolated episode in the chronicles of history; rather it is the continuing struggle against religious xenophobia, racism, economic injustice, war and all forms of oppression that eat away at the heart of our world like an insidious cancer. It is a call for "new beginnings." It is a call for a new vanguard of visionaries who are willing to go into the "no - trespassing zones" of this world system and to declare boldly and courageously that the future of our communities, our nation, and indeed the world, hinge on moral foundations. To accept the radical implications of their dream means that we can no longer feign ignorance and invisibility in regard to the political and economic scenarios that determine our corporate destiny.

A new world is being born - as Thomas Friedman suggests, "The world is flat."³² All around us there is evidence that a changing of the guard is taking place. Throughout the world- in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, in Southeast Asia, in the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe, and within the context of American society significant changes are taking place that are having far - reaching effects on the way we do business. Business cannot go on as usual. We must make new beginnings.

Interconnecting and Interrelating with other Cultures

Where do we begin? First, we must develop new and better ways of seeing and responding to the interrelatedness and the interconnectedness of world cultures. This means that we can no longer see ourselves as solitary actors in a world populated by other peoples whose histories, industries, and life circumstances are intimately connected to our own. We have learned the tragic lesson that what happens in Afghanistan affects what takes place in New York City and Delhi. Being the world's only real superpower brings with it extraordinary capacity to create or destroy fragile relationships with other nations and cultures. While national self - interest is the legitimate prerogative of any nation, we run the risk of forfeiting that right through aggression and dominance by military and economic cooptation, what former Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard University, Joseph Nye, calls, "hard power". We need rather to learn the art of "soft power," i.e., through attraction, influence, and negotiation we appeal to the highest in others' cultures, political values, and foreign policies that are legitimate and have moral authority. "Soft power," is a more reasonable and potentially productive course of action because it requires that we learn to listen deeply to the unpopular voices in our societies that seek diverse ways of understanding. "Soft power," allows us to connect in places of strategic interest.³³ Building world consensus and partnering with those unlikely global neighbors who have criticized our arrogance and avarice in the past is sometimes hard to do, but we must give peace a chance. So much weighs on our willingness to find peaceful ways to violent situations. Right now as we gather to commemorate the legacy of our nations' greatest peacemakers, we have sent thousands of young men and women to fight a nation that most Americans could not locate on a map of the world. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., we need to return to "soft power," the ability to shape others' preferences through nonviolent action.

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally

Secondly, we must think globally and act locally. We must become "global" i.e., learning to see how global policies and actions impact local environments. Leadership, at its best, seeks first to understand its environment and what are the critical issues at stake. The primary questions are always, "What is going on?" "How do I understand what is going on?" "Who makes the rules?" "Who enforces the rules?' Both Gandhi's and King's greatest contributions were perhaps their way of thinking globally and acting locally. Their bold excoriation of war was based on the ways in which they saw the interrelation of poverty, war, and race. We must learn to ask therefore "What is going on?" "How do I understand what is going on?" "Who makes the rules?" "Who enforces the rules?"

Gandhi and King also had a lot to say about what they perceived as the challenges that history has placed upon us. Both believed that there would need to be a reckoning with Western imperialism's own presuppositions about power. Like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us, before his tragic death in 1968, that we no longer live in a small house, but rather we have inherited a world house of inter-relatedness and inter-dependability. He suggested in clear and strident language that we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or die apart as fools. During his later years, King was acutely aware of the need for a broader interpretive framework for understanding what he perceived as a crucial passage in history. He further suggested that the struggles of African Americans must be understood in the light of a "shifting" of the West's basic outlooks and philosophical presuppositions about "power". King argued that indeed

We have inherited a large house, a great 'world house' in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu - a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live together with each other in peace. However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.³⁴

Where Are We Now?

Much has changed since Gandhi's and King's prophetic statements about violence, and yet so much remains the same. They strongly believed that there must be a revolution of values and priorities if we were to make the shift necessitated by global connectedness. As we witness the shifting grounds of global change, we must ask what does this new season of worldwide struggle mean for us? Can we all get along? Dare we hope or must we conclude with those who say that we are at "the end of history."

A Call to Courage and Hope

There is a story told by Olive Schreiner, the South African writer, about an old mother duck who had for years led her ducklings to the same pond. Finally, one day she led a new batch of ducklings to the old pond and it was all dried up and nothing was left but baked mud. Still she persisted in bringing her younglings down to it and walked about flapping her winds with an anxious quack, trying to induce them to enter. But the young ducklings, with fresh young instincts, could hear far - off the delicious drippings from the new dam which was built up higher to catch the water. When they smelled the chickweed and the long grass that was growing up beside the dam, the young ducklings absolutely refused to disport themselves on the baked mud and to pretend. And so they set out for new pastures- perhaps to lose themselves on the way or perhaps to find themselves?

"To the old mother duck," Schreiner writes, "one is inclined to say, 'Ah, good old mother duck, can you not see that the world has changed? You cannot bring water back into the dried up pond! Perhaps it was better and more pleasant when it was there, but it has gone forever; and, would you and yours swim again, it must be in other waters.'"

Brothers and sisters, we must begin again - let us begin again. We must give our nation, our cities, and communities a new dream! A dream that is fashioned out of the best insights of the past and our most critical and informed analyses of the present. We must not be content simply with the legacy of the dream of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but we must hold their vision in a creative, dialectical tension with the world in which we live and refine it in the crucible of struggle. We must not be satisfied with abstract conversations about how it was or used to be or even how it ought to be. The dreams that we dream, the visions that we see, must always be tested in concrete, historical engagement against the barriers that impede the realization of human community. The future of our communities, our nation and the world depends on a new generation of men and women who dare to dream creatively and to call forth new realities based on those dreams.

Heirs of the Dream

We are the heirs of the vision of Gandhi and King. It is a dream that continues and no one can claim it as their own until they are willing "to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before their God." We must not be afraid to get in the water for fear of drowning. We cannot sail to the land of freedom without setting sail. The vision of a peaceful, nonviolent world is not a dream for cravens and cowards who hide behind false justifications for non-action. It is not for spectators who stand on the sidelines and watch injustice and exploitation at a distance. It is not for those vain religionists who bury their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich and pretend that everything will be all right anyway. For when we bury our heads in the sand, we always leave more exposed than is hidden. It is not for greedy and insane puppeteers who hide behind the curtains of social fiction and manipulate the mindscape. It is not for sentimentalists and vain practitioners of religious ideologies that work against community in the name of a justice that leaves the whole world toothless and blind. It is a dream for those who are willing to join the ranks of men and women who are so inspired by the moral order of the universe and the sacredness of human personality that they are willing to make a track to the water's edge and to lay their bodies down as a bridge for future generations to travel over into the land of freedom. It is a dream for women and men who are willing to stand alone when the crowds disperse, who will keep on moving against all odds; who will refuse to cling to falsehoods and lies that contradict reality; who believe that truth has the final word in this universe, and that truth and love will endure forever.

This is the Gandhi King vision. A dream born out of a zeal for justice, nurtured in the praxis of struggle, refined in the fires of persecution, strengthened by the arms of faith, propelled by the vision of hope, enriched by the power of love, and set free by the truth that no lie can endure forever. We are their heirs. We are the ones to whom they have passed the torch. We are the dreamers who must make this world a better place. We are the ones who must continue their dream.

Dream on, dreamers! Dream in season and out of season. Dream in the valley and climb to the mountain and see the Promised Land! See new and greater visions of the New Reality that is coming into the world! See a new heaven and a new earth! See a new kind of people rising out of the dungeons of hopelessness and powerlessness who dare to name their worlds! See the rejected and dejected who sit in the shadows of darkness come forth as bearers of light and hope! See the humiliated and emaciated rise up on wings like eagles, see them run and not get weary, see them walk and not faint! See the land of freedom and harmony for the peoples of the earth! See what the prophets saw! See what the King saw!

If your vision is rooted in justice and truth, there is no power on earth that can nullify its mandate. Politics can't legislate it, poverty can't define it, racism can't destroy it, sexism can't vanquish it, water can't drown it, fire can't consume it, death can't kill it, hell can't hold it, greedy and insane men can't prevent it - for it lives in the mind of God who has said, "Yes!" And when God says, "Yes!" no power in the universe can say "No." Begin again! Hope again! Struggle again! There is a great camp meeting in the Promised Land!

Notes and References

1. Martin Luther King Jr. Stride Towards Freedom: The Montgomery story (New York, Harper and Row, 1958), p. 66.
2. Ibid., pp. 66 - 67.
3. See Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Making of America (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1964), pp. 239 - 50. In Montgomery, the State Board of Education voted unanimously to continue segregated facilities through the 1954 - 55 school year. Gates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 51.
4. King, "Annual Address to the Montgomery Improvement Association," Holt Street Baptist Church, 3 December 1956. King Archives, Atlanta, GA; King, Stride, p. 51; Gates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 73.
5. See King, "Annual Address to the Montgomery Improvement Association," December 3. 1956.
6. See Lerone Bennett, "When the Man and the Hour Are Met." C. Eric Lincoln, ed.. Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), p. 25.
7. Ibid., pp. 24-29.
8. King, op. cit.
9. Ibid., pp. 66-67; Gates, Let the Trumpet Sound, pp. 77 - 80. See also Adam Fairlough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr., (Athens and London, The University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 23 - 35.
10. King, Stride, op. cit., p. 67.
11. Ibid., p. 200; King, "The Negro and the American Dream," Address at the Public Meeting of Charlotte. NC, NAACP, 25 September 1960. p. 3.
12. The "modern Civil Rights Movement" refers to the designation offered by Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984). Morris dates the movement from June 1953, the date of the Baton Rogue protest against the city's segregated bus system. The significance of the Baton Rogue movement, for Morris, lies in its impact upon the strategic maneuvers of African Americans "directly involved in economic boycotts, street marches, mass meetings, going to jail by the thousands, and a whole range of disruptive tactics commonly referred to as nonviolent direct action." (ix) This confrontation marks a significant moment in a long tradition of protest by masses of African Americans predating the Civil War. See John Hope Franklin, "The Forerunners," American Visions 1:1 (January/February, 1986):26 - 35 and Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Tr. (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 11 - 35.
13. Edward G[onzalez]Carroll (1910 - 2000) was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. He earned the A.B. from Morgan College [Morgan State University] (1930); B.D. from Yale University (1933); and M.A. from Columbia University (1941). At the time of the India Delegation planning, he was Pastor of John Wesley Methodist Church in Salem, Virginia (1934 - 35). In 1935, he was ordained an elder in the former Methodist Church, and from 1936 - 1937, he was Pastor of the Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia (1936 - 37). He was an instructor in Bible and Philosophy at Morgan College (1937 - 41); a U.S. Army chaplain (1941 - 45); and Associate Student Secretary of the YMCA in New York City (1945 - 49). From 1949 - 1953, he served as Associate Pastor of St. Marks Methodist Church in New York City, and was Pastor of Epworth Methodist Church in New York City (1953 - 55). From 1955 - 1962, he was Pastor of Sharp Street Memorial Methodist church in Baltimore. In 1972, he was elected a bishop by the Methodist Church's Northeastern Jurisdictional Conference and served the Boston Area until his retirement in 1980.
14. Phenola V[alentine] Carroll (1912 - 1999) was born in Frederick, Maryland and received her B.A. from Morgan College (1933). She served as an analyst for the War Department during World War II, a caseworker for the Department of Welfare in New York City and a social worker for the Baltimore Housing Department.
15. An influential work in this vein was Daniel Johnson Fleming's Whither Bound in Missions? (New York: Association Press, 1925). Fleming, who taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, argued the missionary effort needed a greater sensitivity to foreign cultures and a de - emphasis on evangelical conversions. Fleming had been a missionary in India for 12 years and quoted an Indian statesman as stating, "your Jesus is hopelessly handicapped by His connection to the West." See William R. Hutchinson, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1987), 150.
16. For African American interest in Gandhi, see Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi (1992) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
17. Juliette Derricotte, "The Student Conference at Mysore, India," in The Crisis 36 (August 1929), 267, 280 - 82.
18. M.K. Gandhi, "To the American Negro, A Message from Mahatma Gandhi," Cn'sz's 36 (July 1929), 225.
19. "A Great Christian from India," Spelman Messenger (48) October 1931, 24 - 25.
20. Harijan was an English language weekly published from 1933 to 1956 by the Harijan Sevak Sangh, a society founded by Gandhi to help untouchables (published in Poona in the period 1935 - 1936). "Harijan," was Gandhi's term, meaning "Children of God" in Sanskrit, for the untouchables.
21. For earlier published versions of the interview see M.K. Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1948), vol I, 131 - 134; D,G. Tenduklar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, (Dehli, India: Publications Division, Minsitry of Information and Broadcasting, 1960), vol VI, 48 - 51; Homer A. Jack, ed, The Gandhi Reader: A Source Book of his Life and Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), 313 - 16; Elizabeth Yates, Howard Thurman: Portrait of a Practical Dreamer (1964).
22. For Gandhi's influence on African American thought see Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi (1992).
23. Sudarshan Kapur, op.cit., p. 83 - 85; Thurman, With Head and Heart, pp. 105 - 107.
24. Ji, from the Hindi, a mark of respect, usually added to a name.
25. Kapur, op.cit.,p. 83 - 85; Thurman,op.cit.,pp. 105 - 107.
26. Thurman, "Gandhi," January 1948, published in Volume II. The letter of Mahdev Desai to HT, 26 Jan 1936, published in this volume, also speaks of Gandhi's plans to meet the Delegation in Delhi. In addition to the illness of Gandhi, the Delegation, due to "illness and overwork," cancelled their public appearances in Delhi for several days. See "Detailed Schedule." In his autobiography, Thurman implies, inaccurately, that there had been very little contact between Thurman and Gandhi in South Asia until the Delegation arrived in Bombay, Thurman, op.cit., pp. 130 - 131.
27. Bardoli, a small town near Bombay, was the site of an experiment in Satyagraha of total non - cooperation with the British authorities from 1921 to 1922, and again in 1928. The Congress Party had an encampment or ashram in Bardoli which Gandhi frequently used; Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (Harper & Brothers: New York, 1950), 197 - 199, 253 - 256. Bardoli was in a native state, Dharampur [now in Gujarat] which in the mid - 1930s had an area of about 800 square miles, and a population of about 112,000. Like other native Indian states, Dharampur was controlled by a prince and had some powers of self - rule, Indian Year Book, 1935 - 36 (Bombay and Calcutta: Bennett, Coleman: 1935), 200 - 201; CB. Dalai, Gandhi: 1915 - 1948, A Detailed Chronology (New Dehli: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1971), 115.
28. Thurman, op.cit., p. 132. In the article the length of the interview is given as two hours.
29. Ibid.
30. Kapur, p. 91 - 93, 186A
31. One of the most poignant appearances of the quotation, with a mention of Thurman's meeting with Gandhi, is in an article by Bayard Rustin, in which he recounts a conversation he had with Martin Luther King Jr shortly after the two men helped found the organization that would become the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "Even in the Face of Death," in Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (Quadrangle Books: Chicago, 1971), 103. Originally published in Liberation, February 1957.
32. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty - First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005).
33. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
34. Ibid., p. 167.

Source: Gandhi Marg, Volume 30, Number 2, July-September 2008.

Walter Earl Fluker is Executive Director of the Leadership Centre at Morehouse College USA. He has compiled the first volume of a multi - volume series entitled The Sound of the Genuine: The Papers of Hozvard Washington Thurman, to be published by the University of South Carolina Press in Nov. 2008 Email: wfluker@morehouse.edu