04 February 2009
Martin Luther King Inspired by 1959 Journey to India
King’s son, members of Congress commemorate 50th anniversary with visit
Washington — “It was wonderful to be in Gandhi’s land,” wrote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a few months after returning from a monthlong visit to India in 1959. “I left India more convinced than ever before that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”
King says in his autobiography that “Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change” during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1956 that ended segregation on that city’s buses, and throughout the years King led the American civil rights movement.
King wanted to see for himself the results of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign to end British colonial rule and improve the lives of India’s “untouchables” (members of the lowest social caste). Invited by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, King, along with his wife, Coretta, and biographer Lawrence Reddick, arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai) on February 9, 1959, and traveled to New Delhi and several other cities over the next four weeks.
The 50th anniversary of that historic journey is being commemorated in February with a visit to India by King’s son, Martin Luther King III; members of the U.S. Congress, including Representative John Lewis, the last surviving speaker from the 1963 March on Washington; Clayborne Carson, editor of several volumes of King’s papers; jazz musician Herbie Hancock; and others. This State Department–sponsored tour will include two musical performances by Hancock plus a special tribute by Indian musicians.
Carson, director of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection in Atlanta and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, said King appreciated being “enthusiastically welcomed by Nehru and other Indian political leaders at a time when he lacked similar access to America’s top leaders.”
King, Carson said in an essay in The Times of India, contrasted India’s constitutional and legal protections for untouchables with “pervasive racial discrimination in the U.S.” While India’s leaders exerted their “moral power” against caste discrimination, King said, “in the U.S. some of our highest officials declined to render a moral judgment on segregation, and some from the South publicly boasted of their determination to maintain segregation.”
King met with Nehru, President Rajendra Prasad and other officials; social reformers such as Vinoba Bhave, one of Gandhi’s closest associates in the Indian freedom movement and his spiritual successor; writers; academics; and many others — even trapeze artists and lion tamers. King laid a wreath at the site of Gandhi’s cremation at Rajghat, met with Gandhi’s relatives and followers, and discussed human rights in America and India at press conferences, universities and public meetings. “Because of the keen interest that the Indian people have in the race problem, these meetings were usually packed,” he later said.
King declared his belief that "the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence” — called satyagraha — “is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States." One of Gandhi’s techniques for civil disobedience that King’s followers employed was the sit-in, when blacks and sympathetic whites sat together at “whites only” lunch counters in the American South. (See Free at Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement.)
Barack Obama, America’s first African-American president, has identified Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and Taylor Branch’s biography of King, as books that helped shape him. The president has said that Gandhi and King are among his heroes, along with Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.
Another hero to Obama is Lewis, a fearless civil rights activist who was beaten by a white mob during the Freedom Rides of 1961 and by Alabama state troopers during a peaceful march near Selma in 1965. “If Dr. King were here today, I believe he would say that the election of Barack Obama is not an ending,” Lewis said recently. “It is not even a beginning. It is the continuation of a struggle that began centuries ago to build a more perfect union in this country, a union of human kind that expresses one great universal truth. We are all one people, one family.” (See “Martin Luther King’s Dream of Racial Equality.”)
Recently, the staff of All India Radio discovered a lost recording King made the day before he left India, in which he said Gandhi “embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”
In his autobiography King said: “I returned to America with a greater determination to achieve freedom for my people through nonviolent means. As a result of my visit to India, my understanding of nonviolence became greater and my commitment deeper.”
Listen to King’s March 9, 1959, address on All India Radio and read the transcript of the March 9 address (both from the Embassy of India in Washington’s Web site).
See “Americans Celebrate Achievements of Martin Luther King Jr.,” “U.S. Marks 50th Anniversary of Montgomery Bus Boycott,” and the State Department announcement on the commemorative visit. Also see Black History Month.
On January 13, 2009, the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center opened up online access to a major portion of King’s papers. The library is the custodian of the Morehouse King Collection of some 10,000 items. King graduated from Morehouse College in 1948.
More information on King's writings is available on the Web site of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
(Editor’s Note: The U.S. embassy in New Delhi has posted a photo gallery and transcript from the trip. In addition, the U.S. Consulate in Mumbai has posted a photo gallery.)
Martin Luther King's March 9, 1959, address on All India Radio