Malic

Originally Posted by Malic

Martin Luther King on Gandhi

During the Montgomery bus boycott against discrimination towards Negro passengers, Martin Luther King had believed that “the only way we could solve our problems of segregation was an armed revolt.”

After reading about the life of Mohandas Gandhi, however, the outlook of King drastically changed. He saw in Gandhi’s approach the essence of Christianity. In his book Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote that “Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.” The effect on him of Gandhi was such that he decided to go to India for more than a month studying more deeply the life and teachings of Gandhi.

“I came to see for the first time,” wrote King, “that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence, is one of the most potent weapons available of an oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”

“I believe in some marvelous way,” he wrote further, “God worked through Gandhi, and the spirit of Jesus Christ saturated his life. It is ironic, yet inescapably true that the greatest Christian of the modern world was a man who never embraced Christianity.”

Eventually, nonviolence became a way of life for Martin Luther King, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.



Source: Donald T. Phillips, Martin Luther King, Jr. on Leadership. Warner books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, U.S.A.

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