Gandhi's Influence on the Modern African American Freedom Struggle

For a timeline of the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, see this note.

Gandhi's Influence on the Modern African American Freedom Struggle

"It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world."

-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.[1]

"The Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom... Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method."

Among those influential black Americans who formed relationships with Gandhi were:

• A. Philip Randolph
• E.D. Nixon
• Adam Clayton Powell
• Howard Thurman
• Benjamin E. Mays
• Channing H. Tobias
• Bayard Rustin
• Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
• James Lawson

Most of those black Americans who voyaged to India to meet with Gandhi were prominent in academia, the church, and social service organizations. Thus these visits had a great influence on the direction of the African American freedom struggle.

Mordecai Wyatt Johnson (pictured left), Benjamin Mays (pictured right), and James Lawson (pictured below with Martin Luther King, Jr.) were particularly important as bridges between Gandhi and the movement in the United States. Benjamin Mays had met with Gandhi in India in the 1920's. Mays wrote in an essay about his meeting with Gandhi,

"The fact that Gandhi and his nonviolent campaign have given the Indian masses a new conception of courage, no man can deny. To discipline people to face death, to die, to go to jail for the cause without fear and without resorting to violence is an achievement of the first magnitude. And when an oppressed race ceases to be afraid, it is free." [4]

A decade later in 1936, as president of Morehouse College, Mays introduced the young Martin Luther King, Jr. along with his many students, to Gandhi through his lectures.

Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, president of Howard University and a respected orator, met with Gandhian leaders in 1949 in India. Johnson's subsequent sermon on Gandhism in 1950 at Fellowship House, Philadelphia, was so inspirational to King that he immediately bought several books on Gandhi and began his own in-depth study of the man and his vision.[5] In the video above, Martin Luther King discusses the impact Johnson's speech had on him.

In Their Own Words

King wrote of the impact Gandhi had on him at this time:

"When I was in the theological school, I thought the only way we could solve our problem of segregation was an armed revolt. I felt that the Christian ethics of love were confined to individual relationships, I could not see how it could work in social conflicts. Then I read Gandhi's ethics of love as revealed in Jesus but raised to a social strategy for social transformation. This Gandhi helped us to understand and for this we are grateful a decade after his death."[6]

In Their Own Words

King on the influence of Gandhi and the differences between the Indian and American contexts:

"Well, I would say that I owe a great deal to Mahatma Gandhi for my own commitment to nonviolence. I would say that we gained the operative technique for this movement from the great movement that took place in India. Now, of course, there are differences and we recognize these differences. We are in a different cultural situation. The Indian people constituted a numerical majority seeking to gain freedom in a situation where a numerical minority ruled, where in the United States we are a numerical minority. Also there is a distinction between integration and independence. On the one hand a foreign invader is being driven out, in America we are seeking to gain freedom within a situation where we will have to live with the same people the minute we get that freedom, and so there are differences, but I think that the basic philosophy itself, the basic method, is the same and that is that it is possible to stand up against an unjust system resistive with determination and yet not stoop to violence and hatred in the process."[9]