Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869-1948), Indian nationalist leader, who established his country's freedom through a nonviolent revolution and whose teachings inspired nonviolent movements elsewhere, notably in the United States under civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gandhi was born in Porbandar in the present state of Gujarât. He went in 1893 to serve as a legal adviser with a firm in Durban, South Africa. Appalled at the denial of civil liberties and political rights to Indian immigrants to South Africa, he threw himself into the struggle for elementary rights for Indians. Gandhi remained in South Africa for 20 years, suffering imprisonment many times. In 1896 Gandhi began to teach a policy of passive resistance to, and noncooperation with, the South African authorities. The inspiration for this policy came from various sources, including the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the famous essay “Civil Disobedience” by 19th-century writer Henry David Thoreau. Gandhi considered the terms passive resistance and civil disobedience inadequate for his purposes, however, and coined another term, Satyagraha (Sanskrit, “truth and firmness”). In 1914 the government of the Union of South Africa made important concessions to Gandhi's demands. His work in South Africa complete, he returned to India.

Campaign for Home Rule

Following World War I (1914-1918), Gandhi, advocating Satyagraha, launched his movement of passive resistance to Great Britain. Satyagraha spread through India, gaining millions of followers. In 1920, Gandhi proclaimed an organized campaign of noncooperation. Economic independence for India was made a corollary of Gandhi's swaraj (Sanskrit, “self-ruling”) movement. This economic policy involved the complete boycott of British goods and the renewal of native Indian industries.

Indians began to revere Gandhi as a saint and called him Mahatma (Sanskrit, “great soul”). Gandhi's advocacy of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (Sanskrit, "noninjury"), was the expression of a way of life implicit in the Hindu religion. By the Indian practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, Great Britain too would eventually consider violence useless and would leave India. However, a series of armed revolts against Great Britain broke out, culminating in such violence that Gandhi confessed the failure of the civil-disobedience campaign and ended it. The British government seized and imprisoned him in 1922.

After his release from prison in 1924, Gandhi briefly withdrew from active politics. But in 1930 the Mahatma proclaimed a new and successful campaign of civil disobedience, calling upon the Indian population to refuse to pay taxes, particularly the tax on salt. In September 1932, while in jail, Gandhi undertook a “fast unto death” to improve the status of the Hindu Untouchables. Gandhi became the leader of the movement in India dedicated to eradicating the unjust social and economic aspects of the caste system.

In 1934 Gandhi formally resigned from politics and was replaced as leader of the Congress Party by Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1939 he again returned to active political life because of the pending federation of Indian principalities with the rest of India.

Independence

India and Pakistan became separate states when the British finally granted India its independence in 1947. During the riots that followed the partition of India, Gandhi pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to live together peacefully. The Mahatma fasted until disturbances ceased. On January 30, 1948, he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse.[1]

Rosa Louise Parks

Parks, Rosa Louise (1913- ), civil rights leader, born in Tuskegee, Alabama. In 1955 Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. The incident resulted in a boycott of the bus system by blacks, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1956 segregated seating was ruled unconstitutional. Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan, and in 1965 she was hired to manage the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers, Jr. She remained active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal and the Martin Luther King Jr. Award.[2]

King, Martin Luther, Jr.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929-1968), American clergyman, one of the principal leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest. King's challenges to segregation and racial discrimination helped convince many white Americans to support the cause of civil rights in the United States.

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1948 and from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951. In 1955 he earned a doctoral degree in systematic theology from Boston University. While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, whom he married in 1953.

In 1954 King accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery's black community had long-standing grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on city buses. The city's segregation laws forced black riders to sit in the back of buses and give up their seats to white passengers on crowded buses.

In late 1955 Rosa Parks, a leading member of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was jailed for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. King soon was selected as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that directed a bus boycott prompted by Parks's jailing. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted for more than a year. Incidents of violence against black protesters, including the bombing of King's home, focused media attention on the city. A lawsuit filed by an MIA attorney appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States, which upheld a lower court ruling ordering Montgomery's buses to be desegregated. By late 1956 King was a national figure.

In 1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. King and other SCLC leaders encouraged the use of nonviolent marches, demonstrations, and boycotts to protest discrimination.

In 1963 the SCLC joined a local protest in Birmingham, Alabama, attempting to create so much disorder that local white officials would be forced to end segregation in order to restore normal business relations. King and his SCLC staff escalated antisegregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagers and school children to join. Hundreds of singing children filled the downtown streets, angering police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, who sent police officers with attack dogs and firefighters with high-pressure water hoses against the marchers. King was arrested and jailed. The demonstrations— which forced white leaders to negotiate an end to some forms of segregation in Birmingham— encouraged many Americans to support national legislation against segregation.

King and other black leaders organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive protest in Washington, D.C., for jobs and civil rights. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. The speech and the march created the political momentum that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in education and employment. As a result of King's effective leadership, he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace.

In 1965 SCLC joined a voting-rights protest march that was planned to go from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery, more than 80 km (50 mi) away. The marchers met with severe police brutality on a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, as police beat and tear-gassed the marchers. Almost three weeks later, more than 3000 people arrived in Montgomery, where King addressed a rally of more than 20,000 people in front of the capitol. The march created support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which eventually banned the use of voter qualification tests that often had been used to prevent blacks from registering to vote.

Throughout 1966 and 1967 King increasingly turned the focus of his activism to the redistribution of the nation's economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty. In the spring of 1968 he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black garbage workers. King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, prompting riots in more than 100 American cities in the following days. In 1969 James Earl Ray, a white escaped convict, pleaded guilty to King's murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Although many investigators have suspected that Ray did not act alone, no accomplices have ever been identified.[3]

Thoreau, Henry David

Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862), American writer, philosopher, and naturalist, whose work demonstrates how the abstract ideals of libertarianism and individualism can be effectively instilled in a person's life. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts. From 1841 to 1843 Thoreau lived in the home of American essayist and transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1845 Thoreau moved to a crude hut on the shores of Walden Pond, where he devoted his time to studying nature, meditating on philosophical problems, reading classic literature, and holding long conversations with his neighbors.

Only two of Thoreau's works were published during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is the narrative of a boating trip that Thoreau took with his brother in 1839. In Walden, his most enduring and popular work, Thoreau explains his motives for living apart from society and devoting himself to a simple lifestyle and to the observation of nature.

In 1846 Thoreau chose to go to jail rather than to support the Mexican War (1846-1848) by paying his poll tax. He clarified his position in his essay, “Civil Disobedience” (1849), in which he also discussed passive resistance, a method of protest that later was adopted by Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, and by civil rights activists in the United States.[4]