In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr., then only 30 years old and fresh off leading the Montgomery bus boycotts, traveled to India to pay homage to one of his heroes, the late Mahatma Gandhi. Over the course of five weeks, King met with Indian heads of state, spoke with some of Gandhi’s closest followers, and discussed the shared problems facing both India and the United States. To King, the trip was an awakening, a spiritual pilgrimage to the birthplace of nonviolent resistance.
King was never shy about his affinity for the ascetic leader of Indian Independence. Gandhi had been a source of inspiration to King dating back to his days as a young seminary student. He later kept a framed portrait of Gandhi hanging on his office wall, called him the “guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change,” and based his nonviolent direct-action campaigns on Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, the Indian leader’s own philosophy of nonviolence.
Ideas, like people, have ancestries. They are part of histories stretching back generations. The emergence of nonviolence as a political philosophy is no different. While Gandhi and King share an obvious intellectual bloodline through their embrace of nonviolent resistance, these two icons of the twentieth century are themselves part of a much larger genealogy of social protest.
Nonviolent resistance, after all, is a twentieth-century version of what many American abolitionists knew as simply “nonresistance.” A form of pacifism mixed with hints of Christian anarchism, nonresistance rejected all forms of violence. Critically, this included not just physical forms of violence but all systems or institutions whose legitimacy came from a power to threaten or coerce. Such a wide definition included churches, which had the power to excommunicate; it also included governments, as followers of nonresistance held that nations naturally derived legitimacy by monopolizing violence—waging war, arresting citizens, and the like.
The rationale behind nonresistance had everything to do with religion. As nonresisters saw it, Christianity demanded they reject violence in the name of peace and love, as Christ commands. They also believed that institutions such as governments or churches not only corrupted society through the use of force, but that such institutions usurped the ultimate power of Christ in creating the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. To nonresisters, the laws of that Kingdom, not the laws of human governments or man-made institutions, were the only laws worth following and the only laws that truly mattered. Any others superseded the power of Christ.
Not every abolitionist carried the mantle of nonresistance. The wider movement tended to reject pacifism outright. But the philosophy found a special home among the followers of Boston’s William Lloyd Garrison.