“Stride toward Freedom”

For over 12 months, between the early December 1955 and the late December 1956, the black population of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride the city’s bus system, protesting everyday episodes of racial segregation in public transportation, which included the bus company’s refusal to hire black drivers, frequent harassment of black passengers by drivers and, most famously, the prohibition for African Americans to ride in the front seats and their obligation to give up their seats whenever a white passenger would require them to do so.

A key event in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was one of the early fully orchestrated legal challenges to racial segregation in the U.S. South and saw the emergence to leadership in the movement of a 27-year-old Baptist minister, Martin Luther King, whose strategy of non-violent resistance was directly influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.

This paper addresses King’s Gandhian legacy, as emerging in his own account of the boycott, Stride toward Freedom (1958). It argues that Gandhi, whose thought King approached while a student a Crozer Theological Seminary, provided King with the key to reconciling Christian ethics with social change, allowing him to see that true pacifism is not non-resistance to evil, but non-violent resistance to evil.