Martin Luther King Non-Violence and the Use of Natural Law

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on Non-Violence and Natural Law

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is internationally recognized for his iconic leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, which resulted in a furthering of social justice and fairness for people of color. Moreover, the work of King and his movement resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. One of the key strategies that King embraced -- in addition to his soaring oratory, his charisma and his skills as a creative writer -- was the use of nonviolence. This paper reviews and critically evaluates his use of -- and advocacy of -- nonviolence in social change movements, and his use of natural law.

King's Education (Academics / Social Injustice)

In A.L. Herman's book, Community, Violence, & Peace, he presents sections on Gandhi, Buddha, Leopold and King. On page 120 Herman explains that King had passed the entrance exam to get into Atlanta's prestigious Morehouse College "at the age of fifteen without graduating from high school." In order to pay his way through college, King worked on a tobacco farm in Connecticut, where he "expressly enjoyed the personal and social freedom" that a black man could experience in New England (he could sit anywhere in restaurants and movie theaters) (Herman, 120).

However, on his way back to Atlanta from New England, the train he was taking entered Virginia and, as he did earlier on the trip, he thought he could walk into the dining car and find a seat to his liking. But when the waiter "led him to a rear table and pulled a curtain down to shield the white passengers from his presence," he knew he was back in the segregated South (Herman, 120). He stared at the curtain, incredulous that others "would find him so offensive," Herman wrote. "I felt as though the curtain had dropped on my selfhood," King remarked later to a friend (Herman, 120). There is no verification that this was a seminal moment for King, and certainly there were many, many moments and incidents in his young years when it became obvious to him that the evil institution of segregation needed to be challenged.

Herman made it clear -- and this is an important fact to remember when considering King's remarkable legacy -- that when King later graduated from Morehouse College and was lined up to attend Crozer Seminary, he wasn't thinking big picture that he would become a pivotal mover and shaker in the civil rights effort. He just intended "…to become a well-educated Christian minister" (Herman, 120).

Author Lerone Bennett Jr. has written a biography of King, and he adds to the narrative as to how King first came to be interested in Gandhi. Bennett claims that during King's senior year at Crozer Theological Seminary he read with great interest Reverend Walter Rauschenbusch's book Christianity and the Social Crisis. In that text the minister applied the "social principles of Jesus to the problems of the modern world" (Bennett, 1968, pp. 36-37). King later said that Rauschenbush's work "…left an indelible imprint on my thinking." The pivotal theme of the Rauschenbush book was that the church "should take a direct, active role in the struggle for social justice," and this was very poignant for King, and according to Bennett became "a pivotal element" in King's personal belief and philosophy (37).

Another event actually took place prior to King hearing a lecture (explained in the next section of this paper) about Gandhi; it was a lecture by a "Christian rebel" named A.J. Muste who championed a "nonviolent approach" to social change. King though was not "overly impressed" with Muste at that time in his educational career (in 1950) because the idea of "turn the other cheek" for King was only valid in conflicts between two people, and not valid when racial groups and nations were in conflict.

The Literature -- King Learns About Gandhi's Movement

Meanwhile, the three-volume work titled The Papers on Martin Luther King, Jr. offers a treasure trove of background, direct quotes, and personal letters from King. Senior Editor Clayborne Carson explains that King "undoubtedly" came to initially learn about the Gandhian independence movement while attending Morehouse (Carson, 1997, p. 16). Professor Benjamin Mays on occasion spoke of his travels to India on Tuesday mornings at Morehouse, when Mays gave lectures to the student body, Carson explains. The first "extensive" exposure that King had to the strategies of Gandhi, Carson continues, happened while King was studying at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. At that time King was reportedly "inspired by a lecture at Philadelphia's Friendship House" by the president of Howard University, Mordecai Johnson, Carson recounts on page 16.

King was "overwhelmed by Johnson's suggestion that the moral power of Gandhian nonviolence could revolutionize race relations in the United States," author Herman writes on page 120 of his book. Herman quotes King: "I had heard of Gandhi… [but Johnson's] message was… profound and electrifying…" (120).

Based on inspiration from that lecture, King went out and purchased "a half-dozen books on Gandhi's life and works" and according to King's close friend and mentor, J. Pius Barbour, King argued in favor of using Gandhian methodology while he was still in seminary (Carson, 16). However, even before becoming aware of Gandhi's nonviolent approach to civil disobedience and social change -- and prior to the Montgomery bus boycott -- King was preaching about love towards enemies, and in that regard he used a passage from the Book of Matthew: "…Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you…" (Carson, 17). But while the bus boycott was in full swing -- this was a period of time after he had studied Gandhi's tactics and philosophy -- King seamlessly merged Gandhian principals with Christian theology in his speeches and writings.

It should be noted here that King was also very cognizant that many of the "Negroes of Montgomery" were motivated more by Christ's Sermon on the Mount than by "passive resistance" and hence, he toned down his new-found admiration for Gandhi (Carson, 17). King was a leader of enormous intelligence, and his political skills were extremely well honed, so he understood what subjects to give emphasis to, he understood the importance of timing, and in the case of the Montgomery bus boycott, he did not push the wrong buttons with local activists, lest he lose their support. That having been said, when civil rights activists Bayard Rustin and Glenn E. Smiley arrived in Montgomery -- both men with vast experience in Gandhian techniques -- King's sense of local political dynamics was challenged.

King welcomed the assistance of Rustin, and even invited Rustin to participate in Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) meetings. However, King, who was politically savvy, knew that local white leaders that were arresting demonstrators and launching racist diatribes against the MIA would see people like Rustin as outside agitators and use demagoguery against them. The last thing King needed as he led this movement for fairness vis-a-vis public transportation was for local white leaders to denounce the MIA as being promoted by "New Yorkers, northern agitators, and communists…" (Carson, 18).

But you didn't have to be an outsider like Rustin to be subjected to the wrath, hatred and vitriol that Blacks faced from the local city fathers in Montgomery. Juliette Morgan, a white citizen, wrote a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser (the daily newspaper) pointing out the similarities between King's efforts with the MIA and Gandhi's Indian independence campaign. Not long afterwards, she was fired as city librarian. Standing up for justice in the Deep South in that ear was fraught with personal and professional peril.

Meanwhile, in the richly interesting Papers of Martin Luther King there are myriad copies of correspondence to and from King between December 1955 and December 1956. Among them, a letter from King to Professor E.T. Sandberg of Warburg College is worthy of inclusion in this research. In a letter postmarked March 23, 1956, Sandberg urged King to publicly state that "passive resistance" (and not some form of mob mentality) "was central" to the success of the boycott (Carson, 276). King replied on May 31, 1956 from Montgomery, first apologizing for the long delay in responding, which was "not due to sheer negligence, but to the pressure in the involved situation" (Carson, 276). King related that "…the Gandhian influence has been at the center of our movement… we are using passive resistance as the method and love as the regulating ideal" (Carson, 276).

The Literature -- King Fashions a Campaign Based on Gandhi's Movement

"I feel that this way of nonviolence is vital because it is the only way to reestablish the broken community. It… seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the conscience of the great decent majority who through blindness, fear, pride, or irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep…" King's speech on "The Broken Community" presented before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., July, 1962 (Herman, 139).

While King wholeheartedly advocated the use of nonviolent resistance to oppression, he also -- on numerous occasions -- employed his talent for descriptive language that occasionally eschewed hot-button terms like "segregation," "Jim Crow," and "racism." While attending a church conference in Nashville in December, 1962, King avoided using the term "desegregation" and instead invoked the concept of "integration" for the South. As Herman writes on page 140, King had a vision -- through the implementation of nonviolence -- of an "integrated community… an organically unified body." King offered the idea that "Integration is creative, and is therefore more profound and far-reaching than desegregation… integration is genuine intergroup, interpersonal… the ultimate goal of our national community" (Herman, 140).

These above-mentioned precepts reflect the philosophical approach to King's lofty commitment to peaceful solutions. In that same presentation to church leaders in Nashville, King explained his idea for an "organically integrated community" which can only be achieved through "altruistic love" (Herman, 140).

"The universe is so structured that things do not quite work out rightly if men are not diligent in their concern for others," King reminded his audience. "The self cannot be self without other selves," he continued. "All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny" (Herman, 140). In public speaking situations King was clearly, emphatically distancing himself from the shrill rhetoric of black leaders like Stokely Carmichael, best remembered for launching the phrase "Black Power," which "ignited a white backlash" and "alarmed an older generation of civil rights leaders," including King (Kaufman, 1998). Juxtaposed to King's sensitive embrace of phrases like "the beloved community," Carmichael's rhetoric was angry, militant, and to some degree inspired the Black Panther movement and their provocative image of black berets, raised fists, and men with guns.

"When you talk of black power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created," Carmichael said in a 1967 speech (Kaufman, p. 4). He lashed out at blacks and whites that seemed satisfied to let the status quo of segregation continue unchallenged. "We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the cities," he told the media. "It is going to be a fight to the death" (Kaufman, p. 4). In fact King denounced -- without naming Carmichael or the Black Panthers -- the idea of using violence and divisive oratory. "Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear," he wrote in Ebony magazine in 1966 (Herman, 141).

Creating a "beloved community" requires a "qualitative change in our souls as well as a qualitative change in our lives," he penned in Ebony, which in hindsight is far more elegant and thoughtful than the hostile, inflammatory threats that the likes of Carmichael put forward through the media. That said, while the radical, inflammatory rhetoric and the provocative brandishing of weapons by Black Panthers in the inner cities -- circa 1960s -- cannot be justified on strictly legal grounds, in hindsight, given the terrible conditions and lack of political support in Washington, D.C., those actions can be understood and even rationalized as morally defensible in 2011.

It should be emphasized that nonviolence was not always the path that blacks in Mississippi chose; in Michael K. Honey's book (Going Down Jericho Road) the author reports that during civil rights demonstrations in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and elsewhere in the state, "Black Mississippians often were armed and most were not ideologically committed to nonviolence" (Honey, 2007, p. 84). King had no problem with black residents "protecting their homes and families" albeit he continued to speak out advocating nonviolence.

In the summer of 1964 ("Freedom Summer" in the civil rights movement) "A mob of whites [in Philadelphia, Mississippi] attacked the marchers, with King among them." King continued to preach against violence but the next day in Philadelphia he was confronted by the police and elsewhere in the community "blacks exchanged gunfire with several carloads of marauding whites" that had fired rounds into the headquarters of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Honey, 85). What comes across in Honey's book is the coolness, the calm that King showed in his deportment, even in the face of violence and chaos. It seemed to some observers that whites "…largely ignored King's nonviolent demands except when they feared a credible threat of counter-violence by blacks" (Honey, 86).

Honey writes that a twenty-year-old young man named Coby Smith had come to Mississippi with his dad, a union activist, and got into the thick of the demonstrations and the activities that King participated in behind closed doors with fellow marchers. Smith said that notwithstanding King's passion for nonviolence, King "…never backed down from a fight." Smith also noticed that younger blacks tended to side with Carmichael's rhetoric of black power while older protestors went along with King. But King did some cooperative work with Carmichael, according to Honey. Meanwhile King "never argued that everyone had to be a pacifist," Honey explained (87-88) and moreover King conceded that individuals had the right to defend themselves. That said, King also insisted that the movement for racial justice could not afford the "…luxury of publicly taking up weapons or speaking the language of violence" (88). King was media savvy, and he knew if televised images of violence were shown around the country, who started it, and who was responsible for it, would be obscured. The movement thereby would "lose both its moral standing and its appeal to public opinion and government leaders," Honey continued (88).

The mass media played up the divide within the movement -- nonviolence vs. violence -- far beyond what that division actually was in reality, Honey writes on page 88. And while in Chicago, King actually convinced some tough street gang individuals that they could be militant, they could be disruptive and challenging and still not be violent, Honey explains. But the nonviolent training these young black men received didn't matter in the end; in July 1966 a "major riot broke out" and some 5,000 rock-throwing working class and middle class whites "reacted violently to his call for integration," Honey continues on page 88. In that riot, King was hit in the head with a rock.

Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter, Sr. writes in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy that King found in Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to oppression "…a consistency between the principles of personalism and the inherent respect for the person in the method of nonviolence as a strategy and a way of life" (Carter, 2006, p. 220). (When Carter uses the term "personalism" he is relating to the idealistic theory that asserts that the basic features of human personality -- like consciousness, self-determination, and self-identity -- make up the substance of all reality for that person.) King believed that "…what effects one directly affects all indirectly," according to Carter (221). The thought that, "I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be," is what King also came to understand within the Gandhian approach (Carter, 221).

The individual person -- in King's belief -- is the "individual expression of the Love-Intelligence that grounds the universe," and this potential to love through intelligence is "latent in every person," Carter continues (221). It was this latent power that King was appealing to when he broke "the unjust segregation laws"; he was "appealing to the conscience of the segregator" and demonstrating the "highest respect for the humanity of his oppressors by his willingness to accept the penalty for his actions" (Carter, 221). The minds of "many white and black Americans" became what William James referred to as "a theater of simultaneous possibilities" as they watched closely the nonviolent personalism of King, Carter concludes.

While Carter's explanations and observations about King and his personalism are perhaps a bit esoteric to the layperson, he has credibility when it comes to the life and times of Dr. King. In fact, in 1958, King "privately recruited" Carter as a 10th grader to attend Morehouse College; and twenty-one years later, Carter became "the first Dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel" and today he is a tenured Professor of Religion and College Curator at Morehouse (Morehouse College, 2010).

King read widely in order to come to a full understanding of how nonviolence can help bring about social change, and one of the books he read was The Power of Nonviolence by Richard Gregg. According to author John J. Ansbro, Gregg lived in India from 1925 to 1929, and he was close to Gandhi for several months during that period of time. Gregg's interpretation of Gandhi's strategy is that when an assailant "encounters no violent resistance from his victim, he loses the moral support that such resistance would give him" (Ansbro, 1982, p. 147). But if the victim did use violence against the assailant, then the assailant could "enjoy the moral reassurance that his attack is morally acceptable," according to Ansbro's reading of Gregg's theory. The attack would become morally acceptable because in effect "the victim would be assigning the same value to violence as the assailant" (Ansbro, 147).

On the other hand, if the victim eschews a violent response, the assailant reportedly is "startled" and becomes less than certain about his own values; the assailant then realizes that the courage shown by his nonviolent opponent "is higher than physical bravery and is a stronger realization of human nature," according to Gregg's beliefs (Ansbro, 147). This sounds very good in theory, and clearly Gregg gleaned this concept from his time studying Gandhi, but one has to wonder if the perpetrator would really have the presence of mind to view his intended victim as having courage. In the best of all worlds, perhaps, this scenario would be in evidence. But it would seem that some of the violent attackers of today -- take the megalomaniac that cold-bloodedly murdered over 60 young people in Norway in July, 2011, for example -- wouldn't be the least bit impressed with a nonviolent response from an intended victim. Perhaps Gregg was alluding to a protest demonstration in which the assailant is a law enforcement officer wielding a Billy club, and rather than resisting or fighting back, the demonstrator uses nonviolent tactics and simply resists arrest. Still, on page 148 of Ansbro's book, the Gregg theory continues; in contrast to the perpetrator, Ansbro writes, the nonviolent resister "is in a position of poise and power."

What Gregg has laid out as to why nonviolence works and aggression fails seems remarkably naive. In today's violent world, some trainers show demonstrators how to defend themselves, how to fight back and how to make sure someone is taking video of the entire action for later use in possible litigation or prosecution. But in his passion to bring home what King has learned from Gandhi, Gregg lists ten reasons why the position of the person resisting violence is "superior" (Ansbro, 148). Several of them are logical; others are a stretch.