Gandhi and King – A Final Evaluation
Wendy Sumner Winter

As we reflect on two of the greatest peacemakers since Christ, we first see the diminutive man, Gandhi, enveloped in white and speaking softly with a tinny voice to throngs of brown people, also in white. Despite the heat of the Indian climate, there seems to be a crisp coolness about the crowd as it clamors around the Mahatma. Then there is King, dressed most often in black silk, though sometimes in workman’s overalls, his booming baritone rising and falling in dramatic crescendo. He is surrounded by a dark skinned crowd – peppered by the occasional white face – who are dressed in pressed-white shirts and thin black ties. This crowd is hot and electric, their black skin shining with perspiration and the whites of their eyes flashing with fervor.

Though their movements, on surface, seemed to have a similar aim, Gandhi and King were very different in personality and practice, but most importantly in the fundamental content of the message. The nuances of each man’s teachings are important to understand and reflect upon if we are to be successful in continuing the work that they began. We must be ready to critically evaluate the value of each method in order to shape our world through the principle of non-violence.

At first pass it may seem unimportant to examine the personalities of these two men in an evaluation of their ongoing effects on peacemaking in the 21st Century. Yet, because what is seen of both of these men today is little more than caricature, it behooves us to try to understand the cult of personality surrounding them. What has this “cult” done to the efficacy and power of their messages, and how did each of these men contribute to the cultivation of this “cult?”

Both Gandhi and King were exceptional in their upbringing. Both of the middle class, they were somewhat insulated from the urgent dilemmas that faced their co-ethnics. For Gandhi, his ingrained idea that he was British, as well as Indian, did not seem strange. In fact it was only in the confrontation with the fact that he wasn’t British enough – he could not achieve “Britishness” (because of the color of his skin) – that caused him to begin to engage in the movement toward liberation. It is easy to imagine that the genesis for Gandhi was, at first, a sort of woundedness. Clearly he moved past this initial sense toward a deep understanding of the need for systemic change and the reclamation of Indian identity, but the fact that it was a personal blow that set Gandhi on his path is perhaps an important component of the “personality” that he came to cultivate through the rest of his life. He became “in-your-face” Indian, and turned the old maxim around to “if you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em.” He undertook this task by himself and was, throughout his career, largely solitary in the administration of his goals. While he did seek to build coalition, Gandhi seemed equally interested in providing a very singular and autonomous example of discipline and life that he would have liked to see all Indians emulate.

Gandhi very directly cultivated his own “cult of personality.” He knew what he meant to the people of India, to the British, and to the rest of the world and was skillful at manipulating that image to serve his purposes. The “fast unto death,” for example, shows how much Gandhi presumed his own popularity. The drama was as much about testing the Indian people’s love for him as it was about reaching peace. Clearly the rightness or wrongness of Gandhi’s actions in the fast can be debated, but there can be little doubt in his obvious confidence in the devotion of Indians to him.

King, on the other hand, was literally thrust into the movement – at first as a sort of lightning rod – by others. Though, as a black man, he had certainly been the object of racism, his life had been unique. He traveled in relative comfort through the largely white halls of academia and had little need or opportunity to rub shoulders with the truly suffering members of his race. He said that, until Montgomery, he had experienced no tribulations in his life. The “job” came to him, not born out a great passion or reaction against personally received injustice, but rather, relatively randomly at the hands of other ministers who were either afraid to engage or were too entangled in the politics of the movement to have effect.

Where Gandhi was intensely self-composed and self-determined, King’s personal willpower was deficient. Much has been made of his infidelity and propensity toward other carnal indulgences. Where Gandhi was very obviously interested in self-promotion in addition to the promotion of his cause, King’s role in the cultivation of his “personality” seems to be more nuanced. Surely, King knew that he had the power to move people and that he possessed a certain magnetism, but he seemed to eschew personal limelight.

The “cult of Dr. King” seems to have been relegated to him. Because he did not have great powers of organization, King was exhaustively scheduled by his managers. This entourage wielded great power over King’s life and worked hard at promoting his celebrity. His ability to speak to both white and black, educated and uneducated, crowds made King the perfect ambassador between the groups, and he was therefore called upon incessantly.

In some ways the white powers, too, had an interest in fostering the cult because it served the purpose of placing King at arm’s length – making him appear bigger than life. In American secular society a hero such as King is all good and well, but no one can be expected to actually attain the ideals of that hero. After his death, the whitewashing of King continued. In the vein of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and JFK, King’s early death fanned the flames of his legend – again, blowing him out of proportion to real life and making him a possession of pop culture. Just as many Christians focus myopically on the Cross, to the exclusion of the life of Christ, the memory of King has become more about his death than his life – more about the conspiracy and less about the truth of his words.

The problem with creating yourself, or allowing yourself to become, a “cult of personality” is that the struggle can be over-shadowed by the specific human players. We see that very readily today where a sanitized, innocuous, and emasculated image of both Gandhi and King prevail. They have been neutered by our devotion, and their message has almost been drowned in notoriety. The status quo never has to worry about the power of an icon because in bestowing that rank they have placed the ideals safely beyond reach.
Both Gandhi and King began to see, near the end of their lives, how their celebrity could not sustain their respective movements. It was a great disappointment to them both. The division of Pakistan and India, the riots and violence in America, showed them that they could not accomplish their goals alone by the strength of their own will. What can be learned from this today is the danger of placing one person at the head of a movement – the success of which can be compromised by normal human flaws. It is far better to build strong coalitions of equal partners.

In practice, Gandhi and King were very similar. There is a ready parallel between the salt march and the ill-fated poor peoples’ campaign. Both men consistently utilized non-violence to meet their objectives. A potent result of both men’s non-violence was the exposure of the de-humanizing hatred and injustice of the system. Row after row of Indians marching into the batons of British soldiers, and Bull Connor’s dogs slicing the legs of children could not have been more powerful images. Both men understood this power and were not afraid to use it.

The differences between the two, however, are also important. They had very different opponents, and their stated objectives were also dissimilar. Gandhi sought separation from Britain, while King sought integration into America. Gandhi’s borders were geographic, while King’s were systemic. Gandhi wanted Indians to become more Indian, while King (at least early on) wanted blacks to be allowed to become more American.
So, their practices reflected these desires. Gandhi donned traditional garb and encouraged Indians to learn native skills which would return industry to Indians. Many called his dispositions regressive, but Gandhi saw them as attempts to reclaim an intrinsic Indian identity. One of Gandhi’s flaws lay in his simplistic view of India as one nation. He had an idealistic notion that the whole of India would separate from Britain and retain that “something” that was intrinsically Indian; but that didn’t seem to satisfactorily account for the deep differences that existed within Indian culture, especially between Muslims and Hindus (not to mention Sikhs and Jains). The cultural rift remains today and is alarmingly precarious in the now distinct nations of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.

King, on the other hand, dressed and spoke like an “American.” He was working toward being a part of a nation whose religious beliefs and general cultural dispositions were largely homogenous. As a Christian and believer in republican government, King was a member of a certain majority and so had a common language across the racial divide that proved quite powerful. He called upon the white majority to live up to their already stated beliefs and principles – placing the burden upon the presumed good will and integrity of the people. In doing this, King was extending an invitation to the oppressors to join in the banishment of oppression. This is a far more effective method than enforced banishment because it, in true “Gandhian” terms, leaves both parties more empowered than they were before. Here is one way in which King proved to be more successful than Gandhi.

Finally, the content of the two teachers differed substantially. Gandhi and King used different language to describe the motivation for and objective in their practice of non-violence. For Gandhi primacy was given to truth; for King love. The difference is critical. Gandhi’s context, an amalgam of many cultures united by geography, pressed on him the need to find common ground. This common ground, he said, was the overlapping truth among people that provided for the highest level of personal excellence and fulfillment, as well as autonomy. Gandhi’s search for truth is a reflection of his Hindu beliefs under which life is a constant purification process leading toward the singularity which is truth.

Truth, as the ultimate goal, is problematic in part because of its abstractness. More importantly, though, it is ultimately a solitary endeavor. As such, it creates a weakness in Gandhi’s philosophy not so much because it is wrong, but because it is inadequate. In the end, as an ultimately introspective exercise, truth does not necessarily require engagement. What it needed is something more explicitly relational.

King’s emphasis, love, is better suited to be the impetus for change. While love may have a level of abstraction in definitional terms, it is intuitively known by everyone and so serves better. King’s understanding of love, modeled on the life of Christ, is preeminently productive in the struggle for social change. Not only does it set the terms of the relationship between opposing parties, but also it unequivocally requires reconciliation and active movement. Love, as exemplified by Christ, supercedes the “little t” truths that opposing parties might hold and therefore does not fall prey to the relativism that endangers Gandhi’s philosophy.

In the end Gandhi and King’s legacies must be judged by how the movements have survived. The review is mixed. While India has made great strides as an independent nation, vestiges of the caste system still exert force on Indian society. In addition, non-violence has not triumphed fully as can be seen in the intense acrimony between the nations of Pakistan and India. What may be Gandhi’s greatest bequest is the philosophy of non-violence that he formulated and which has been built upon by successors such as Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, and of course, Martin Luther King.

Evaluation of Dr. King’s legacy is perhaps even more difficult. Because there are both legal and psychological components of integration, it may be tempting to rest on the legal accomplishments of the past thirty years and overlook the remaining psychological barriers of the American apartheid. King knew very well that these were distinctly different levels of change, saying that he knew that the law could not make a man love him, but it could restrain him from lynching him. This is an important first step, of course, but the question is if the laws have resulted in a full transformation of the hearts and minds of American. Obviously they have not.

The most important task for those who want to keep the work of Gandhi and King alive is to extricate it from the “dream” and bring it into full, if gruesome light. Even if we have made great strides, advancement is always at peril if we do not remember how we got here. The journey is more than just about getting a seat on the bus, or the train, it is about changing the way people think and feel. Only love will be able to do that.

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