When it comes time for you and me to protect ourselves against lynchings, they tell us to be nonviolent… I have never advocated any violence. I have only said that black people who are the victims of organized violence perpetrated upon us by the Klan, the Citizens Councils, and many other forms, should defend ourselves …. I wouldn’t call on anybody to be violent without a cause. But I think that the black man…will be justified when he stands up and starts to protect himself, no matter how many necks he has to break and heads he has to crack…. So we only mean vigorous action in self-defense, and that vigorous action we feel we’re justified in initiating by any means necessary.42
This last phrase, “by any means necessary,” was one of Malcolm’s favorites,43 and its frequent use indicated what he thought of Gandhi’s and King’s conception of the necessity of nonviolent means. Further, when King, following Gandhi, argued against Malcolm that “nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards,” that it resists with the “principle of love,”44 Malcolm countered in his old sardonic tones: “Don’t you give me that you love me and make me do the same thinking when there’s nothing in our backgrounds nor anything around us which in any way gives either of us reason to love each other. Let’s be real!”45
Malcolm never appreciated the power of nonviolent political action. Martin Luther King, Jr. actively demonstrated in America, as Gandhi had in India, that there is nothing “unreal” about nonviolence. Their capacity for expressing in action theories of nonviolence was not the only feature they shared. Another evident similarity was that although both Gandhi and King would be deeply traumatized by racism, their family backgrounds were stable, and, in particular, economically secure. Unlike Malcolm X, whose family, especially after his father’s murder when he was a child, was chronically poor, the fathers of Gandhi and King were strong and ample providers who exercised considerable influence within their respective communities.46 Their relatively privileged status was accompanied by privileged education, at least when compared to many others of their communities. Whereas Malcolm went without a formal education after elementary school, educating himself in prison, the families of Gandhi and King ensured graduation from institutions of higher education, in law and theology respectively, that were expensive and empowering. Each employed his elite education to maximum effect in his personal advancement. Malcolm enjoyed none of these advantages. Perhaps it follows from this sort of class analysis of Gandhi and King that they should have remained comfortable with capitalists albeit critical of capitalism. They handled money well themselves and profited from contacts with the wealthy.47
King’s Use of Satyagraha: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
The conception of King as “America’s Gandhi,” however, did not come from such similarities. It sprang from a signal event that will live long in the lore and legend of nonviolent action, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, when 50,000 blacks of that city in Alabama gave the American civil rights movement its prototype for the future.48 In the decade 1955–65, Malcolm and King remained rivals in the arena of black movement politics, but the contest was always uneven. King constantly eclipsed Malcolm’s leadership because he could implement his ideas in action. Even in Harlem, Malcolm’s base of power, his most sympathetic critics would say, “All he’s ever done was talk. CORE and SNCC [Congress on Racial Equality and Students Non-violent Coordinating Committee] and some of them people of Dr. King’s are out getting beat over the head.”49 King had shown a capacity for mobilizing blacks and getting them on the streets in campaigns of dramatic defiance; he had mastered a method of action that Malcolm seemed unable to grasp, even though the method was initiated entirely by black leaders and practiced en masse by blacks as oppressed and deprived as any among Malcolm’s urban proletariat. The proof of this came from Montgomery, Alabama.
The Montgomery story began on the evening of December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black seamstress on her way home from work, refused to yield her seat on a crowded bus to a white man. By doing so she was defying the city segregation ordinance.50 It is significant that the protest began on a bus, where the daily humiliation of blacks was most prominent and predictable, and by a woman, for black women used buses for their transportation to work and suffered persecution the most. From the moment of Rosa Parks’s defiance, women played a prominent role in the boycott and in this respect she “merely exemplified the spirit, commitment and determination of black women in the city…black women were very much the backbone of this movement.”51
The first week of that December was an especially good one for the history of nonviolent action in America. Rosa Parks’s momentous “No”—“the accumulated NO of Negro history in America”52—was immediately reinforced by a ringing affirmation of justice in her black community, for its instantaneous response to the news of her arrest was compliance by nearly all its members with the call for a bus boycott.53 During that week also, the black community of Montgomery discovered that it had an authentic leader in its midst, the twenty-six-year-old minister of its Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
On the evening of December 5, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a mass meeting called to endorse the proposed bus boycott. For King to have assumed a role of leadership at that moment and place seemed most improbable, given his youth and inexperience. He had been in Montgomery for only a year. His main professional qualification was a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University, not an obvious asset for leadership of a civil disobedience campaign in Montgomery. His first year at the Baptist Church had been successful, but there was no indication from this that he was inclined toward political activism. King had been educated at a good “colored elementary school,” where he was taught that “a good nigger was a black who minded his own business and accepted the way things were without dissent.”54 One might have predicted on the basis of this record that his speech that December evening would fall flat. But the opposite happened: King delivered a “masterpiece”55 that “shook the church to its foundations.”56
Later, King called this “the most decisive speech of my life,” while his biographers recognize it as a prototype for the many that followed.57 It began by introducing one of the major themes of the civil rights movement to come: “We are here because of the bus situation in Montgomery. We are here also because of our love for democracy, because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth. We are here because we are American citizens, and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means.”
If the good news for America was that its black citizens love democracy, its de jure system of rights, then the bad news was that the de facto situation in Montgomery fell far short of the democratic ideal. This gap must be closed by direct action so that blacks may realize the “fullness” of their citizenship. King dwelt on the de facto, the humiliation and fear that pervaded the black community because of racism and how the persecution of Rosa Parks personified this. Then he reinforced his statement of allegiance to democracy with an appeal to Christian values as well: “I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are a Christian people. We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. We only assemble here because of our desire to see right exist. This is the glory of democracy. The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for the right.”
Democracy and Christianity: these two ideas constitute the core of the American value system and King weaves them together to use them well. Blacks want only to embrace this system; they protest, but only “for the right.”
King proceeds now, in the latter part of the speech, to the method of protest, and how its commitment to nonviolence embraces rather than rejects the ideals of democracy and Christianity:
Don’t let anybody make us feel that we are to be compared in our actions with the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Council. These organizations are protesting for the perpetuation of injustice in our commu
nity. We are protesting for the birth of justice. Their methods lead to violence and lawlessness. We will be guided by the highest principles of law and order. We are not here advocating violence. There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation. Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion. Our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again we must hear the words of Jesus echoing across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies’… we must not become bitter, and end up by hating our white brothers. As Booker T. Washington said, ‘Let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.’
And we are not wrong; we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, justice is a lie.
This is probably, together with King’s incomparable “I have a dream” speech of August 1963, his finest piece of oratory. It shows his rare skill at presenting protest as a glorious part of the American experience. “Our method,” he declares, represents “the highest principles of law and order”; “our actions” constitute the “deepest principles” of Christianity. The message is as conservative in essence as it is radical: as citizens we must strive to obtain the best in our national tradition.
King concludes the speech with a statement of ethnic identity:
“We are going to work together. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a race of people, of black people, of people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.’”58
Malcolm might have made such an appeal to black pride, but King’s speech is significant more for its cogent statement of themes that Malcolm could not have expressed, even in his last stage. Like Malcolm, King discovered in the 1950s that he had extraordinary oratorical powers, and he used them to condemn the hypocrisy of white racists. Yet, unlike Malcolm, King appealed directly to America’s value system of constitutionalism and Christianity.59 In this speech, it is clear how King came across as a strong preacher and patriot, a man of God and nation. Malcolm, conversely, projected himself until the end as a staunch Muslim, insisting that “I don’t even consider myself an American,” and emphasizing an ideology of Black Nationalism which he persistently opposed to Christian/American patriotism.60 King sought to reform a system so that it would keep its promises. When the Montgomery bus boycott was ultimately won, the triumph was due to a favorable Supreme Court decision61 and King rejoiced that “God Almighty has spoken from Washington, D.C.”62 At least for the federal system, then, there was hope: the Constitution expressed it, and sometimes the courts.
Malcolm, in contrast, saw the entire American system as rotten and never ceased to say that it must be scrapped. In this respect, Malcolm and Gandhi had more in common than Gandhi and King; for Gandhi’s opposition to the British system in India was total. Yet, Malcolm, unlike Gandhi and King, devised no method to attain his radical end. This was not only his fatal flaw but it was the major weakness as well of Black Power leaders who followed him. They tended to miss the main point of Montgomery even though King had argued it incisively. This was that nonviolent action by blacks in America proved tactically superior to methods of violence.63
For this reason, King found Gandhi’s ideas useful. Whereas Malcolm, as noted above, scorned both Christianity and Gandhism as “criminal philosophies,” King declared that at Montgomery, “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.”64 It was indeed the method of satyagraha that appealed to King. Relatively early in his intellectual development, while a theology student at Crozer Seminary, he heard Mordecai Johnson, President of Howard University, lecture on Gandhi. This was the fall of 1950 when King had a psychology of religion course taught by George Davis, a pacifist and strong admirer of Gandhi.65 In fact, King could have heard about Gandhi from many sources within his community because black Americans had developed a strong interest in Gandhi since the early 1920s. His achievements in India had inspired abundant notice in the black American churches and press.66 Delegations of black leaders had traveled to India to seek his advice as early as 1936. Gandhi was so impressed with their earnestness that he remarked in 1936 that “it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world.”67
In that lecture by Mordecai Johnson, King might have heard Gandhi’s prophecy repeated because he recalled that Johnson’s “message was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.” So began what King calls a serious study of Gandhi:
As I read I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. I was particularly moved by the Salt March to the Sea and his numerous fasts. The whole concept of ‘Satyagraha’, (Satya is truth which equals love, and graha is force; ‘Satyagraha’ therefore, means truth-force or love force) was profoundly significant to me. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships…. But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.
Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. For Gandhi, love was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months …. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.68
Once again, it is Gandhi’s method that appeals most to King and not the twists and turns of Gandhi’s journey to swaraj that parallel so strikingly the life of Malcolm X. Stride Toward Freedom attempts to systematize key principles of nonviolent resistance. The analysis is strictly faithful to the theory of satyagraha. Its tenets range from a Gandhian insistence that this “is not a method for cowards” because it demands courageous resistance, to its humane attitude toward adversaries. It concentrates on King’s distinctive contribution of the Christian concept of agape or “disinterested love,” “redeeming good will for all men.”69 This idea of agape brings Gandhi’s spirit of inclusiveness into an American context more than any other aspect of King’s philosophy. Yet it is clear that the achievements of both men lie not in the realm of theory but of an exceptional ability to express their ideas in action.70 King did have a firm understanding of satyagraha but the sublime element in the story of Montgomery is of how he and his people found a way to practice it.
Unfinished Journeys: Martin and Malcolm from the Perspectives of Swaraj and Satyagraha
In his biography of Malcolm X, Peter Goldman comments that “The grandest dream of all is the entente noire that might have been between Malcolm and Martin Luther King—the confluence of two great currents in contemporary black history in a single, irresistible revolutionary tide.”71 Advocates of King or of Malcolm will suggest many reasons why this dream was doomed, but from a Gandhian perspective at least one set of causes might be found in those qualities that each leader lacked, or perhaps was not given time to develop further.
Malcolm’s failing is the more obvious because his lack of a credible method of political action found him, in the end, without any movement at all. At the basis of his failure was an apparent inability to face an issue that King had resolved in Montgomery. This was the problem of means, and specifically of the use of viole
nt means for attaining social and economic justice for black Americans. King was able to gain the moral high ground in the civil rights struggle by unambiguously advocating an unconditional adherence to nonviolence. Malcolm was denied this moral advantage by his persistent approval of violent action. As Peter Goldman has observed, “The distance between… Malcolm’s proposition that ends justify means and King’s that means and ends are one was a vast one.”72 This distance not only separated Malcolm from King, it also removed him from the realities of movement politics in the United States. King saw, as Malcolm did not, that for blacks in America the appropriation of morality to politics was sound strategy. None of Gandhi’s insights helped King more than that into the centrality of means.73
King’s shortcomings are less apparent than Malcolm’s because, like Gandhi, he has been canonized since his assassination.74 Yet, when King’s life is compared with Malcolm’s, one must be impressed with how far the latter came in terms of personal growth. The distance, as compared with King, is dramatic from the viewpoint of class origins, but to make the contrast in class terms alone tells only a fraction of the story. The depth of Malcolm’s achievement is expressed eloquently in his autobiography. This is, above all, an account of “Malcolm’s emancipation as a man—a victory of soul so complete that, having achieved it, he didn’t even need to hate whitey any more.”75
Mahatma Gandhi Page 27