Shin-kickers From History: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi
American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. always claimed, "From my background I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi, I learned my operational technique."
The son and grandson of Baptist preachers in Atlanta, George, Martin Luther King went to Crozer Theological Seminary ready to fight for civil rights but full of doubts about the value of Christian love as a political strategy. He had adopted Reinhold Niebur's philosophy that social evil was too intractable to be transformed by anything as simple as turning the other cheek.
A speech by Mordecai Johnson, then president of the largely Black Howard University, changed his mind. Johnson had just returned from India and had come back electrified by tales of Mahatma Gandhi's successful struggle for Indian independence. Fascinated by Gandhi's use of non-violent non-cooperation as a form of protest, the young theological student bought every book he could find on the Indian leader who had defeated the British empire with passive resistance and a spinning wheel. As he read, he became convinced that Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence was "the only logical approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States."
King got his chance to apply Gandhi's tactics for the first time in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. On December 1st, at the end of a long work day as a seamstress in a local department store, Rosa Parks was tired and her feet hurt. She refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man and was arrested. King, 27 years old and the new pastor of Dexter Street Baptist Church, was thrust into a leadership role in the protest against bus segregation that became known as the Montgomery bus boycott.
Under King's leadership, the black protest remained orderly and peaceful. For thirteen months, the 17,000 Black residents of Montgomery refused to use the public bus system, even if it meant walking to and from work, adding hours to already long working days.
King and 90 others were arrested and indicted for illegally conspiring to obstruct the operation of a business. Unlike Gandhi and his followers, who accepted arrest as a natural consequence of civil disobedience, King appealed his conviction, thereby keeping his cause in the public eye and gaining a national reputation as a civil rights leader in the process.
In 1959, King made a pilgrimage to India as the honored guest of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been Gandhi's right hand man during the battle for independence from Britain. He returned to the Unites States confirmed in his conversion to non-violence and inspired to follow the example of Gandhi's satyagraha campaigns, particularly his march to the sea.
King's approach to non-violent non-cooperation was not identical to Gandhi's. The Hindu ascetic and the Baptist minister agreed that non-violence succeeds by transforming the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, allowing the powerless to seize power through self-sacrifice. But where Gandhi preached that the practice of satyagraha was rooted in patient opposition, King believed in actively confronting his antagonist.
On January 24, 1998, a statue of Gandhi was unveiled at the Martin Luther King Historical Site in Atlanta, commemorating the philosophical tie between the two men.
The Amritsar Massacre: Another Step Toward Indian Independence
Narrow entrance into Jallianwala Bagh
World War I brought India one step closer to demanding its independence from Great Britain.
Indian regiments sailed overseas and fought alongside their Canadian and Australian counterparts. (If you visit the memorial gateway at Ypres, you will see how many of them died in defense of the empire.) Indian nationalists loyally supported the British government during the war, fully expecting that British victory would end with Indian self rule on the dominion model.
Instead of self-rule, India got repressive legislation. The Rowlatt Acts, passed by India's Imperial Legislative Council in March, 1919, continued the special wartime powers of the Defense of India Act. The new act took powers originally intended to protect India against wartime agitators, including the right to imprison those suspected of "revolutionary conspiracy" for up to two years without trial, and aimed them at the nationalist movement.
Indian members of the legislative council resigned their seats in protest. Mahatma Gandhi took the protest further, declaring a national day of work stoppage in the first week of April as the first step in a full-scale campaign of non-violent, non-cooperation against the so-called "Black Acts".
The first implementation of the new laws occurred on April 10 in the Sikh city of Amritsar. The government of the Punjab arrested Indian leaders who had organized anti-Rowlatt meetings were arrested and deported without formal charges or trials. When their followers organized a protest march, troops fired on the marchers, causing a riot. Five Englishmen were killed and an Englishwoman was attacked. (She was rescued from the rioters by local Indians.)
Brigadier General Reginald Dyer was called into Amritsar to restore order. The situation called for diplomacy and good sense. Dyer used neither. On April 13, he announced a ban on public gatherings of any kind. That afternoon, 10,000 Indians assembled in an enclosed public park called Jallianwala Bagh to celebrate a Hindu religious festival. Dyer arrived with a troop of Gurkhas and ordered them to block the entrance to the park. Giving the celebrants little warning and no way to escape, he ordered the soldiers to fire on the unarmed crowd. They fired 1650 rounds in ten minutes, killing nearly 400 people and wounding over 1000.
In Britain, Dyer was widely acclaimed as "the man who saved India." The House of Lords passed a movement approving his actions. The Morning Post collected £26,000 for his retirement and gave him a jeweled sword inscribed "Saviour of the Punjab."
The government of India censured Dyer's actions and forced him to resign his commission, but did nothing to stop local officials from continuing to inflame public opinion. In the Punjab, which remained under martial law for months following the Amritsar massacre, government officials acting "in defense of the realm" repeatedly humiliated and offended the people under their rule with actions such as making Indians crawl through Jallianwala Bagh.
Instead of "saving India", Dyer accelerated Indian nationalist activity. Many Indians who had previously been loyal supporters of the Raj now joined the Indian National Congress, India's largest nationalist organization. Bengal poet Rabindranath Tagore resigned the knighthood he had received after winning the 1913 Nobel prize for Literature. Motilal Nehru, president of the Congress and father of the first president of independent India, declared that "all talk of reform is a mockery". Attempts to become equal partners within the Raj were almost over. Soon the push for independence would begin.
This post previously appeared in Wonders and Marvels.
History of the World in 12 Maps
This post is about a book, a book review, and the discussion that the review sparked.
As I've mentioned before, I review books for Shelf Awareness for Readers. Mostly history, a little reference--and the occasional cookbook because writer does not live by history alone. Some of the books I receive for review are on subjects I'd never think to read on my own.* Others scream my name immediately. Guess which category A History of the World in Twelve Maps fell into?
Here's my review for Shelf Awareness:
Mapping is a basic instinct, argues Jerry Brotton: humans and animals alike use mapping procedures to locate themselves in space. Map-making, on the other hand-- using graphic techniques to share spatial information-is an act of the human imagination. It is never objective; the map is not the territory. And maps of the world are more subjective than most, embodying the worldview of the culture that produced them. In A History of The World in Twelve Maps, Brotton, a British history professor, looks at twelve world maps, the people who created them, and what they tell us about the time and place in which they were made. In the process, he tells the reader a great deal about how we view the world today.
Beginning with Ptolemy's Geography and ending with the virtual maps of Google Earth, Brotton considers maps and geographical theory from Islamic Sicily and fifteenth century China as well as the more familiar worlds of medieval England and Renaissance Europe. He looks at different approaches to shared questions: how a map is oriented (north is not the universal answer), what scale to use, where the viewer stands in relation to the map and how to project a round earth on a flat surface. Along the way, he considers politics, religion, cosmology, mathematics, imperialism, scientific knowledge, and artistic license. Each map is unique; all have features in common.
A History of the World in Twelve Maps is global history in the most literal sense: twelve variations on a universal theme.
Normally I would simply re-post the review here in the Margins, with proper attribution to Shelf Awareness, and hope that it directed a few more readers to an excellent book. However, this review prompted some interesting responses from readers that I would like to share.
Graham Thatcher wrote to me with an idea about maps and perception, which he has given me permission to share:
…while teaching a persuasion course, I took a National Geographic Mercator map of the world, blocked out the names of countries, and hung it upside down on the board. We had been investigating how our individual "world views" develop and when confronted with an antipodal projection, our literal world view was unrecognizable.
I think this is brilliant and intend to try it as soon as we move into the new house, where I'll have a bigger office and a bit of wall space.
On a similar note, fellow historian, and long-time co-conspirator, Karin Wetmore sent me the following link to an interesting map/memory/perception project: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/what-you-get-when-30-people-draw-a-world-map-from-memory/282901/
What ideas do you have about turning the world--or at least our map of it--upside down?
* Being knocked off my usual paths occasionally is one of the intangible benefits of reviewing.