The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Martin Luther King Jr. hailed as most influential Gandhian

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Martin Luther King Jr. hailed as most influential Gandhian

Aletta André

Dr. Clayborne Carson

CHENNAI: Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi represent a contribution to the solution to problems that are still very much with us, Clayborne Carson, Professor of History at Stanford University and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford, U.S.A., said here on Monday.

In a talk hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Studies and the U.S. Consulate General, Chennai, at the Potti Sriramulu Memorial Building in Luz here, Dr. Carson spoke about the influence of Mahatma Gandhi on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

“For suppressed people that are all of a sudden free, catching up is a hard thing to do,” Dr. Carson said, while adding that after the U.S. Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the struggle did not end for Martin Luther King, Jr. who then moved his family to a poor area and worked with garbage workers until his death in 1968.

But a lot has been accomplished in the 20th century, he said. “The majority of people in the world gained basic rights. And for the most part this change took place in a relatively peaceful manner. This is a wonderful story, which needs to be told so that young people facing problems today can be inspired by grassroots people such as King and Gandhi.”

When in the 1950s the young minister Martin Luther King, Jr. became prominent as a U.S. civil rights leader, he had heard of Mahatma Gandhi through several African-Americans who had travelled to India. He was not immediately convinced that Gandhi’s ideas were the way to go for the U.S. struggle — indeed, initially King had armed bodyguards. Dr. Carson pointed out that Gandhi’s influence in the U.S. was not only there at the top, with the leaders of the civil rights movement, but it was also there at the bottom.

While King was quite cautious with civil disobedience and getting arrested – something that distinguishes him from Gandhi, as was later pointed out by someone in the audience – a group of young students from Nashville who had learned about Gandhi had no problems with that. They started to take buses to the south of the U.S., demanding equal treatment right up to Mississippi.

In 1959 King visited India, which Dr. Carson argued was a significant point in history. “King went there to learn from the veterans, who had known and worked with Gandhi, but in India he found that he was more Gandhian than the Gandhians,” he said. “He became the most influential Gandhian in the world, spreading the ideas more strongly than any of the Gandhians in India could. It is as if King took Gandhi’s ideas from India and brought them into the second half of the 20th century,” Dr. Carson said.

Frederick J. Kaplan, Consul for Public Affairs of the U.S. Consulate General in Chennai, was present.

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