Casting a black Gandhi: Martin Luther King Jr, American pacifists and the global dynamics of race

Hodder, Jake

Abstract

Martin Luther King Jr. is widely read through his association with Gandhi’s ideas and practice. Whilst it is important to neither overstate nor ignore this influence, the paper retraces the work undertaken behind-the-scenes to script this relationship for wider audiences. It questions how King’s casting as America’s Black Gandhi was strategically undertaken, by whom and for what purposes, as well as exploring why it was ultimately short-lived. Although King experimented with Gandhism briefly in the late-1950s, by the early-1960s the idea had largely been dropped. In particular, the paper focuses on the role played by the American pacifist movement up to, and including, organising King’s visit to India in 1959. These sources are used to make a broader argument that King’s ability to inhabit Gandhi’s legacy during the movement’s early years was critical to forging global anti-colonial connections. As such the paper argues that nonviolence was more than a repertoire of resistance techniques, but a spatial mechanism which could fold scale, bridge distance, and thereby produce and reshape racial solidarity itself.

Citation

Hodder, J. (2019). Casting a black Gandhi: Martin Luther King Jr, American pacifists and the global dynamics of race. Journal of American Studies, 55(1), 48-74. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875819000033

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 15, 2018
• Online Publication Date: May 14, 2019
• Publication Date: May 14, 2019
• Deposit Date: Oct 24, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: May 16, 2019
• Journal: Journal of American Studies
• Print ISSN: 0021-8758
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-5154
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 55
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 48-74
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875819000033
• Keywords: General Arts and Humanities; General Social Sciences
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1186910
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies/article/casting-a-black-gandhi-martin-luther-king-jr-american-pacifists-and-the-global-dynamics-of-race/C85D745CADA5852FF786312511857511
• Additional Information: License: Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
• Contract Date: May 16, 2019