January 20, 2025 · By Dr. Terry Oroszi
The Gandhi-King Relationship
Originally published on the center's prior site. Lightly revised for the new home.
In 1959, a young pastor from Atlanta traveled to India with his wife. He had been studying the work of Mahatma Gandhi for years by then, but to study a method from books is one thing and to walk its sites is another. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King spent roughly five weeks meeting with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Vinoba Bhave, members of Gandhi's family, and the leaders carrying his work forward. They visited Sabarmati Ashram. They walked the sites of the Salt March. They sat with the methods that would, within months, shape the Montgomery Improvement Association's next moves and, within years, shape Birmingham, Selma, and the March on Washington.
Dr. King published his account of the trip in Ebony magazine in July 1959 under the title "My Trip to the Land of Gandhi." The piece is the most-cited primary source on what the trip was, and what it did to him. He wrote: "To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim."
The lineage between Gandhi and King is not metaphorical. It is operational. King's method, as practiced in the American South, is satyagraha refracted through the Black Christian tradition. He said so explicitly. The Montgomery Bus Boycott had Gandhi's fingerprints on its tactics. The Birmingham campaign was choreographed with the discipline of a nonviolent direct action manual that traces back to Gandhi's South African and Indian campaigns. The patience to absorb violence without returning it, the discipline of training participants in advance, the willingness to fill the jails: this is not American invention. It is Indian inheritance carried home by a pastor who took the trip seriously.
Coretta Scott King carried that work forward through The King Center, founded in 1968. Arun Gandhi, Mahatma's grandson, carried it forward through the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, founded in 1991, and through the Season for Nonviolence, founded in 1998 with Coretta's blessing. The two families have collaborated for decades.
The Gandhi-King Center for Nonviolence was founded in Dayton, Ohio in 2024 to continue that work, in this generation, on American soil. We carry the Season each year. We hold artifacts that document both lives. We bring members of the two families together when we can. And we ask, as Gandhi and King both asked, that the people who hear about this work be willing to practice nonviolence, today, in the small decisions of their own lives.
That is the assignment. It is the same assignment it always was.