Dr. Martin Luther King’s Journey to Non-Violence 

By Malik Russell 

Ironically, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., probably the world’s best-known civil rights leader and advocate of non-violence, did not always “completely” embrace the idea of non-violence. Researchers and writers point out the fact that during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. King had loaded weapons in his house, and after his house was bombed in 1956, “King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless.” 

However, Dr. King’s worldview and philosophy of non-violence was based on a solid foundation and would continue to grow and expand, particularly after his historic visit to India in 1959 to pay homage to a philosophical mentor—Mahatma Gandhi.  

After the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. King was able to achieve a long-held desire to travel to India, the home of one of his idols—Gandhi—whose leadership and non-violent protest strategies played a key role in India freeing itself from British colonial rule.  

In early 1959, Dr. King, along with his wife, Coretta Scott King, and Montgomery colleague Lawrence Riddick, traveled to India for a 5-week visit. The trip was an opportunity for Dr. King—who modeled his own non-violent engagement strategies on Gandhi’s—to deepen his understanding of the non-violent resistance techniques that his hero pioneered. In India, Dr. King met with prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and other heads of state as well as with close friends of Gandhi and other religious leaders. He also met with Swami Vishwananda, an activist “at the heart of the nonviolent movement to eradicate untouchability ideologies.” 

Dr. King was well aware of the “practice of Untouchability and the discrimination that was faced by Dalits in India. He compared the treatment meted out to Dalits with the way African-Americans were treated in the United States.” His trip to India would not only expand his worldview but also bolster and enhance his belief that non-violent direct engagement was the most effective strategy to end racism and oppression of Black people in America. 

A few years later, one could see the evolving nuances and growing clarity in King’s views regarding non-violent direct action through his Birmingham Letter, which was written in response to criticism from eight white clergymen who attacked his engagement tactics in a published letter. When the letter appeared, King had been imprisoned in a dark Birmingham jail “with no mattress and denied any phone calls due to previous protests against segregation. 

Dr. King channeled his anger and disappointment in his fellow clergymen to pen the now-famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which was critical of the “white liberal” and explained his strategy of non-violent direct action:

“We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.” 

Dr. King then went on to answer their criticisms by explaining that “nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored...” 

Through his Birmingham Letter, Dr. King was not only explaining non-violent direct action to those “liberal” clergymen in Birmingham, but to the nation as a whole, pushing back against criticism that the strategy was too passive to end segregation in the United States. A year later, Dr. King would win the Nobel Peace Prize. 

In 1965, two years after he wrote the Birmingham Letter, Dr. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), were invited by Chicago activists to lead a demonstration against unfair housing practices and the de facto segregation that, while not as blatant as the legal segregation of southern states, still plagued the north in similarly sinister ways. This de facto segregation existed in education, employment, and housing—where it took the form of redlining, a practice where banks refused to provide mortgages or loans to those seeking to purchase or rebuild homes in Black neighborhoods. The impact of redlining can still be seen today in Chicago, which remains one of our nation’s most segregated cities. 

While less familiar with the social-political landscape of the “northern ghetto,” Dr. King clearly understood both the dichotomy and parallels between the North and South and why it was necessary for the SCLC to support activists and campaigns there. “In the South, we always had segregationists to help make issues clear.… This ghetto Negro has been invisible so long and has become visible through violence,” said Dr. King.

In Chicago, Dr. King and the SCLC would be newcomers in a city with its own activists. This included gangs and advocates of Black Power, who were mobilizing for change and had already organized massive non-violent protests calling for the powerful Mayor, Richard Daley, to use his influence to eliminate the oppressive measures under which the Black, Brown, and poor were living.  

In 1966, Dr. King moved his family to a “dilapidated” apartment on the West Side of Chicago in the North Lawndale neighborhood, a formerly white ethnic enclave that had experienced “white flight” once Blacks began to move in. 

“Among the first of these ‘people’ King received in his new home were the leaders of one of the West Side’s most fearsome black street gangs, the Conservative Vice Lords, a group which, in the spirit of the time, had begun to refer to themselves not as a gang but as ‘nation’.”  

Later that year, Dr. King, along with the SCLC and “more than a hundred members of Chicago’s most notorious street gangs convened in a downtown hotel on a June afternoon. The Black P. Stone Rangers, the Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords—all were represented. In the ornate glamor of a Sheraton ballroom—'an atmosphere of carpeting and candelabra,’ one reporter called it—gang heads sat alongside clerics and activists, lawyers and community organizers.” 

The goal was simple. “King and his allies in the Chicago community hoped to mobilize the gangs toward nonviolent direct action in service of the Chicago Freedom Movement. And they hoped to turn them away from the fratricidal violence that had recently begun tearing through the city’s black neighborhoods, where gunfire had become a soundtrack to the daily lives of many residents. 395 people had been murdered the previous year—many of them in gang wars, almost all of them with guns.” 

While reinforcing violence as a path to failure and jail, Dr. King also “saw violence as originating in the glaring deficiencies of resources, services, and investments in poor neighborhoods of color. Echoing the proposals of other civil rights leaders and organizations such as A. Philip Randolph and the National Urban League, King called upon the government to put together a ‘massive Marshall Plan’ for Chicago’s poor, to help rebuild poverty-ravaged communities in ways similar to the United States’ aid to European nations after World War II.” 

The SCLC would also initiate Operation Breadbasket, led by Rev. Jesse Jackson, which sought to end economic exploitation and racist hiring practices. 

While some progress was made in Chicago, many viewed the work done there by Dr. King and the SCLC as a failure. They managed to achieve agreements with Mayor Daley, the Housing Authority, and the Mortgage Bankers Association to open housing; yet, by early 1967, King—who had stayed in Chicago until then, leaving only to write Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?—felt he had been betrayed by the Chicago establishment.  

He said in March of that year, “It appears that for all intents and purposes, the public agencies have [reneged] on the agreement and have, in fact given credence to [those] who proclaim the housing agreement a sham and a batch of false promises.” 

When King attempted to march in one white neighborhood, he found himself facing violence and racism so vitriolic that he said, “I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago." 

MLK’s experiences in Chicago’s ghettos would seep into his worldview and influence his continued expansion of non-violent direct engagement and a greater understanding of the ways in which policies—both de facto and legal—reinforced the economic isolation of Black people and the racism, poverty, and malaise that fueled the internecine violence in the Black community. Dr. King would later identify the ways in which America’s hypocritical foreign policy around the world was directly linked to its domestic policies that kept Black people shackled.   

MLK saw a direct connection between the circumstances of Black people in the U.S. and the government’s failure to spend resources on peace and opportunity through anti-poverty programs while billions flowed to support the increased militarism in Vietnam and other places around the world and away from communities that needed those resources the most. 

In Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence, which many consider his most provocative speech against a worldwide system of white supremacy, King said:

“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” 

In explaining his opposition to the war in Vietnam, MLK said:

“My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years—especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” 

In April of 1967, nearly a year to the day before his horrific assassination, MLK gave his sermon on the war in Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York City, closing it with a redemptive call for a revolution of values:

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”