Influences Of The Great

13 Pages 3178 Words

Love for Gandhi was a powerful method for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that he tried to find the way for social reform that e had been seeking. Based on his knowledge and his experience in India, his determination and belief in nonviolent resistance were strengthened to help achieve freedom for African Americans in the United States through nonviolent means. Finally he found his answer in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. As he grew up he followed the principle, “Hate the sin not the sinner.” He also followed “Forgiveness is the ornament of brave.” (www.mkgandhi.org) Gandhi used non-violence not only at the individual level but also on the social level for abolition of untouchability, picketing, and non-co-operation. He firmly believed that non-violence must be lived in day to day life. Gandhi worshiped God through the service of man and looked upon all human beings as but the manifestations of God himself.
Montgomery’s black community had longstanding grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on city buses. Many white bus drivers treated blacks rudely, often cursing them and humiliating them by enforcing the city’s segregation laws, which forced black riders to sit in the back of buses and give up their seats to white passengers on crowded buses. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted for more than a year, demonstrating a new spirit of protest among Southern blacks. Martin Luther King’s serious demeanor and consistent appeal to Christian brotherhood and American idealism made a positive impression on whites outside the South. “Mahatma Gandhi has done more than any other person of history to reveal that social problems can be solved without resorting to primitive methods of violence. In this sense he is more than a saint of India. He belongs—as they said of Abraham Lincoln—to the ages. In our struggle against racial segregat...