You don't get to be called "Mahatma," which means "great soul," for nothing: Gandhi (1869–1948) is among the most revered figures of the 20th century. Even Albert Einstein—yep, electric-haired, mustachioed, physics-revolutionizing Einstein—said that "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." Not in a bigfoot-isn't-real kind of way, but in a wow-how-could-anyone-be-so-great kind of way.

But what's all the fuss about? Why do so many people think Gandhi is so great? Why did he get his own Oscar-winning film? Why is he beloved by people in bumper sticker–covered vans everywhere?

Because he had convictions and he stuck to them.

Now, so did a lot of other people, like, oh, Hitler and Stalin. Ambition isn't always a good thing. But Gandhi's convictions were the good kind: he believed in a philosophy called ahimsa, an ancient doctrine of nonviolence, which he used in an activist way to help bring about the independence of India/Pakistan from Great Britain in 1947.

Betcha see where this is going.

Dr. King first heard about Gandhi in seminary. After a little deep pondering and some chats with Bayard Rustin and others, MLK eventually concluded that nonviolent resistance was "the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom" (source). And he decided that's how the U.S. Civil Rights Movement should go.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Sounds good, right? But, as Dr. K found out, you can run into some snags. Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent activism assumes—and this will be hard to believe if someone's cut in line in front of you recently—that people are fundamentally decent. Here's the logic: oppressed people protest nonviolently; maybe they're roughed up a bit; maybe there's a little sprinkling of death here and there; but, eventually, the oppressive power and/or the people it represents get tired of harming morally upright protesters, decide that This Is All Wrong, and cut out all the oppression nonsense.

This idea ran like clockwork in Birmingham, where Bull Connor violently opposed the civil rights marchers with his dogs-and-hoses routine, which literally (okay, not literally) shocked the pants off many ordinary Americans and also the Kennedy administration.

But in Albany (GA) and Chicago, local leaders like Laurie Pritchett and Mayor Richard J. Daley were hip to King's methods, and things didn't go so well. They opposed MLK's nonviolence not with aggression but with calm, routine arrests and political concessions, which made things seem not very bad at all in their cities. Don't get us wrong, things were bad, but they were playing nice to make Dr. K go away. As a result, support for MLK's actions in these places dried up, because it seemed to many people that he was stirring up trouble for no reason.

Slaughterhouse-Five Million

So it's questionable whether Gandhian methods are universally effective; our discussion of Malcolm X explores how nonviolence might even need the threat of violence to work. And, as strange as it sounds, nonviolence can be taken to an extreme. Check out what Gandhi said about the Holocaust:

Hitler killed five million Jews […] It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. […] As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions. (Source)

His point is that, had the Jews resisted nonviolently en masse, their deaths might have called attention to the Nazi crisis sooner; instead, they died in silence, the horror of the concentration camps fully grasped only toward the end of the war. Still, this comment sounds remarkably callous to us today.

Whether violence or nonviolence ultimately preserves more life can sometimes be unclear; ironically, like Dr. King, Gandhi was assassinated. What can we say? People find peace weirdly threatening.