Nonviolence

The first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and had advocated for India’s release from British rule. Nehru’s political and social work helped create an independent India in 1947, and inspired Martin Luther King in his own struggle for the freedom of African Americans in the United States. During King’s 1959 India trip, which he called “one of the most concentrated and eye-opening experiences” of his life, he met with Nehru (Papers 5:232).

Celebrated as one of the civil rights movement’s most courageous young leaders, John Lewis, a founding member and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), greatly contributed to student movements of the 1960s. He described Martin Luther King as “the person who, more than any other, continued to influence my life, who made me who I was” (Lewis, 412).

As an historian, cultural critic, and intellectual, Cyril Lionel Robert James internationalized Pan-Africanist ideas while making contributions to global Leftist political thought. After speaking to Martin Luther King in 1957, James wrote his colleagues that the Montgomery bus boycott was “one of the most astonishing events of endurance by a whole population that I have ever heard of” (James, 25 March 1957).

As a minister who trained many activists in nonviolent resistance, James Lawson made a critical contribution to the civil rights movement. In his 1968 speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King spoke of Lawson as one of the “noble men” who had influenced the black freedom struggle: “He’s been going to jail for struggling; he’s been kicked out of Vanderbilt University for this struggling; but he’s still going on, fighting for the rights of his people” (King, “I’ve Been,” 214).

A student activist in the Nashville, Tennessee, sit-in campaign of 1960, and a longtime staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Bernard Lafayette gained a reputation as a steadfast proponent of nonviolence before Martin Luther King offered him the position of program director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1967.

When Martin Luther King, Jr., went to the Fellowship House of Philadelphia one Sunday afternoon in 1950 to hear Mordecai Wyatt Johnson preach, he was treated to a message on Gandhi “so profound and electrifying” that he was propelled to buy “a half-dozen books” on the nonviolent revolutionary (King, 96).

An original founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Houser expanded his activism for racial justice internationally in 1953, when he established the American Committee on Africa (ACOA). Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a member of ACOA’s national committee, regularly corresponded with Houser, writing that he felt an “abiding concern” for Houser and his work opposing colonialism and South African apartheid (King, 21 March 1963).

Pacifist, writer, and activist Richard Gregg was the first American to publish a book on nonviolence. Gregg’s The Power of Nonviolence, published in 1934, explained Gandhi’s nonviolent principles and his methodology of social change. In the foreword to the book’s second edition (1959), Martin Luther King affirmed that “new ways of solving conflicts, without violence, must be discovered and put into operation” (Papers 5:99). In 1957, when King was asked by an official from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to name the books that most influenced him, he included Gregg’s book along with those of Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, and Walter Rauschenbusch.

Regarded by Martin Luther King as “close personal friends,” Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were among the celebrities involved in efforts to publicize and fund the work of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (King, 11 April 1961).