Abstract
Martin Luther King Jr. is widely read through his association with Gandhi's ideas and practice. Whilst it is important to neither overstate nor ignore this influence, the paper retraces the work undertaken behind the scenes to script this relationship for wider audiences. It questions how King's casting as America's black Gandhi was strategically undertaken, by whom and for what purposes, as well as exploring why it was ultimately short-lived. Although King experimented with Gandhism briefly in the late 1950s, by the early 1960s the idea had largely been dropped. In particular, the paper focusses on the role played by the American pacifist movement up to, and including, organizing King's visit to India in 1959. These sources are used to make a broader argument that King's ability to inhabit Gandhi's legacy during the movement's early years was critical to forging global anticolonial connections. As such the paper argues that nonviolence was more than a repertoire of resistance techniques, but a spatial mechanism which could fold scale, bridge distance, and thereby produce and reshape racial solidarity itself.
Highlights
Martin Luther King Jr. is widely read through his association with Gandhi’s ideas and practice
Whilst it is important to neither overstate nor ignore this influence, the paper retraces the work undertaken behind the scenes to script this relationship for wider audiences
The paper focusses on the role played by the American pacifist movement up to, and including, organizing King’s visit to India in. These sources are used to make a broader argument that King’s ability to inhabit Gandhi’s legacy during the movement’s early years was critical to forging global anticolonial connections. As such the paper argues that nonviolence was more than a repertoire of resistance techniques, but a spatial mechanism which could fold scale, bridge distance, and thereby produce and reshape racial solidarity itself
Summary
Martin Luther King Jr. is widely read through his association with Gandhi’s ideas and practice. The paper focusses on the role played by the American pacifist movement up to, and including, organizing King’s visit to India in These sources are used to make a broader argument that King’s ability to inhabit Gandhi’s legacy during the movement’s early years was critical to forging global anticolonial connections. On February , just after arriving in India, Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta awoke early to lay down a wreath on the shrine of the Raj Ghat in Delhi, the memorial site where Gandhi’s body had been cremated It was a fitting tribute paid by a man whose recent, meteoric rise to fame could be partly credited to his outspoken commitment to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence. When King was questioned in on the books which most influenced his work, for example, besides Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience and Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis, he listed three Gandhian classics: Louis Fischer’s landmark biography, Gandhi’s own autobiography and Richard Gregg’s The Power of Nonviolence
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