The common, latter-day perception of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., is largely race-based, a heroic yet racially narrow view of men who advanced the social standing of their people. Yet this misses the greater significance of the common philosophy these two men espoused. Rather than calling on a highly mobilized Indian society to rise up in violence, Gandhi adopted an inclusive, pan-religious, humanist ethos that sought a peace which all could embrace. King, who pointedly acknowledged his commitment and dedication to Gandhian principles of non-violent resistance, envisioned an America with problems that went far deeper than the racial divide which he and the leaders of the civil rights movement sought to bridge. In short, Gandhi and King saw to the root of the problem, and understood it to be far more serious than even the violent manifestations of their eras indicated. Both were men of profound vision and intelligence, leaders who were taken before their most important work could be completed.
Gandhi’s struggle was leveled at an institutionalized racism that underpinned the British colonial system, an anachronism that Gandhi sought to prove could no longer stand on moral grounds. Gandhi’s strategy was rooted in spirituality, but not a Hindu-centric spirituality (Norlander 2012). Pilgrimage marches, prayer meetings and hunger strikes were used “to reach out to multiple audiences from the Indian masses to Hindu and Muslim communities, British Christians, and others” brought together within a single, purposeful and irresistible tide (Snow, Della Porta, Klandermans and McAdam 2013, 1). Gandhi, like King, knew that truly transformative change cannot benefit one group at the expense of another.
King also understood that lasting change would require a far greater sacrifice than even the one his followers made on behalf of justice and social freedom. Peter Drier writes that King was surprised by the violent reaction the civil rights movement received from working-class white people in Chicago in 1965. To King, civil rights was about much more than racial equality; it aimed at nothing less than social justice for all of the disenfranchised peoples in the United States, victimized by an inequitable system that benefits a very few at the expense of many. In 1964, King had called for a kind of economic “Marshall Plan” that would benefit poor blacks and whites (Drier 2013). At about this time he foresaw the need for a form of democratic socialism in order to undo the socio-economic injustice he saw all around. In 1966, he told his closest advisers that “You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industryit really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism” (Drier 2013).
In his response to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, King made a dire prediction about American society, which he foresaw had made a pastime of violence and killing (Noejeim 296). The culture of violence destroyed both Gandhi and King, one may well argue, specifically because they sought to effect unilateral social change. “Gandhi and King worked tirelessly for social justice: in Gandhi’s case, it was his unique reform-minded brand of swaraj, and for King, it was the beloved community” (Noejeim 296). Indeed, Gandhi introduced views on just about every social issue imaginable (Noejeim 296), not just freedom for Indians or social empowerment for Hindus. He and King understood that to settle for anything less than social justice for all would be a betrayal of their principles.
References
Drier, P. “Martin Luther King Jr. Was a Radical, Not a Saint.” Alternet, 20 January 2013.
http://www.alternet.org.
Noejeim, M.J. (2004). Gandhi and King: The Power of Nonviolent Resistance. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Publishing.
Norlander, R.J. (2012). “Gandhi and Education – Part 1.” The Saybrook Forum.
http://www.saybrook.edu/forum/phs.
Snow, D.A., della Porta, D., Klandermans, B. and McAdam, D. (2013). The Wiley-Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
