01/17/08:King's Cross-culture Quest Combined Faith, Liberation - Vincent Kavaloski
King's Cross-culture Quest Combined Faith, Liberation
The Capital Times :: EDITORIAL :: A10
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Vincent Kavaloski
Opposite one another in Martin Luther King's study were two powerful portraits, one of Jesus and the other of Mohandas Gandhi. "Jesus provided the spirit of nonviolence, and Gandhi provided the method," he often explained.
But how could a Christian minister be so profoundly influenced by a Hindu reformer and activist who had been assassinated years earlier?
The answer to this question might provide us with some guidance as we struggle to become an increasingly pluralistic and multicultural society. Gandhi's lifelong influence on King came roughly in three stages.
First, during his student days at Morehouse College and Crozer Seminary, he learned from black intellectuals like Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse, and Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, who themselves were inspired by Gandhi's successful nonviolent movement against British imperialism. Their message was so profound and electrifying that the young King immersed himself in the writings of Gandhi.
Mays and Johnson seemed to offer a solution to a conundrum that Martin was struggling with: How does an oppressed group fight back effectively against an oppressor without being corrupted by hate and violence? But as King later admitted, his understanding of Gandhi at this point was "purely intellectual."
It took the catalyst of the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-56) to bring King's understanding of the power of nonviolent action to a second and deeper experiential level. Here another brilliant black intellectual and activist, Bayard Rustin, played a key mentoring role.
Rustin was a Quaker, a socialist and a pacifist who had gone to prison during World War II for 28 months for resisting the draft. He had also traveled to India and met personally with Gandhi's followers. He coached King on Gandhian strategies of nonviolent noncooperation against Jim Crow laws and drew up organizational plans for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The third and most profound stage came in 1959, when the 29-year-old Martin Luther King, recuperating from a knife attack, fulfilled a dream by flying to India on what he called "a pilgrimage to Gandhi-land." For a month he traveled the country, meeting with many Gandhians who greeted him reverently as "the black Gandhi."
At a state dinner with Prime Minister Nehru, another surprising guest was Lady Mountbatten, the widow of Britain's last viceroy of India. King reflected that not only had Gandhian nonviolent resistance defeated the mighty British Empire ("one of the greatest things in history"), but it had done so in such a spirit of reconciliation and love that former enemies could sit down together at the "table of brotherhood." This was Gandhi's historical legacy: liberation without hate.
King's most profound experience, however, occurred at Gandhi's ashram (or intentional community). Here he requested to spend the night alone in Gandhi's tiny hut, praying and mediating. No one knows for sure what transpired that night, but it appears to have been a deep spiritual experience for the young Baptist minister. He left vowing to emulate Gandhi by spending one day each week in fasting and prayer, a vow that he was sadly unable to keep due to the ever-increasing demands of the civil rights movement.
King was a very different personality than Gandhi - earthier, more sensual, more passionate in his oratory. And his personal experience with a living God was very different from Gandhi's abstract truth-force. Nevertheless, despite these and many other differences in culture, religion and historical context, King was able to reach across a divide to discover the powerful universal principle of mass nonviolent action and apply it brilliantly in the U.S. civil rights movement. He was able to expand and strengthen his own philosophy and faith by reaching out to the "other" in a spirit of understanding and common humanity.
How many of our current leaders or leaders-to-be are able to do the same? Virtually all of the current political candidates conspicuously assert their Christian faith. Yet who among them is willing to seek common ethical ground with Muslims, Jews, Hindus and others? As we enter a new era of global religious and cultural strife, Martin Luther King's example of bold cross-cultural dialogue may provide a path forward.
Vincent Kavaloski teaches a class each fall on Martin Luther King's philosophy at Edgewood College.