ABSTRACT
In 1936 Mahatma Gandhi met on two separate occasions with African American leaders—at that time called Negro leaders—in the United States. Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance is called satyagraha. However, satyagraha is not merely a philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Satyagraha is first and foremost a way of conducting oneself in the world, and secondly, Gandhi insisted that there was nothing passive about it. Gandhi’s strategy—his weapon of satyagraha—was to pursue what he believed was correct, to encourage the British to accept his actions, and, if the British chose not to, to suffer the penalty for violating their law. He had acted similarly years earlier when he first established his ashram on the Sabarmati River. So just as Gandhi had begun his life with concerns about the relative inequality of the Indians with respect to the British, Martin Luther King began his life with concerns about the relative inequality of Negroes with respect to white America.
