Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi

Detailed yet lucid, this useful study persuasively argues that many African Americans encountered and debated Gandhian ideas of nonviolent struggle decades before Martin Luther King Jr. brought them to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Kapur, a lecturer at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, cites extensive coverage of the Indian independence movement in the black press as the strongest proof of such interest. Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois maintained a vision of international racial solidarity, while more popular leaders like Marcus Garvey frequently cited India and Gandhi as examples for blacks. Several of Gandhi's English followers and Indian nationalists met with blacks in the U.S., while six black leaders visited India and Gandhi from 1935 to 1937. A. Philip Randolph, the black labor leader who fought job segregation during World War II, began to cite similarities between his methods and those of Gandhi, while the Congress of Racial Equality and other groups adopted Gandhian techniques. However, Ghandhism did not gain mass appeal until King--who heard a sermon on Gandhi in 1950--fused it with the black religious tradition. (Apr.)