Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (King) was a path-breaker and a trailblazer in the arena of civil rights. When people think of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) they associate King with the iconic flashpoints of the era: Montgomery, the March on Washington, Birmingham and Selma. Moreover, King is synonymous with the non-violent character of the CRM – indeed, many scholars have attributed the non-violent ethos of the movement to King’s incorporation of Gandhian ideals.

However, this conventional encapsulation of the CRM overlooks the crucial contribution of the African American student sit in movement¹ of 1960, which used Gandhian non-violence to defeat segregation for the first time since the Montgomery Bus Boycott (MBB). The student uprising rekindled a CRM that was faltering under King’s stewardship. Its success reminds us that grassroots activists, not King, successfully leveraged the lessons of Gandhian non-violence to combat segregation at the dawn of the 1960s. The sit in movement’s application of Gandhian ideals furnished a core template of resistance to segregation for the remainder of the CRM.

Undoubtedly, Dr. King inaugurated the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (MBB) of 1955-1956. But he struggled post Montgomery to conceive of a way in which Gandhian mass action could be deployed to dismantle segregation. While the boycott tactic would prove to be of great use to the sit in movement, it alone was insufficient to precipitate the demise of lunch counter-segregation. It had to be preceded by Gandhian civil disobedience which brought African Americans face to face with their white oppressors. This was especially so given the fact that the boycott tactic that was the centrepiece of the MBB would be of no use by itself in restaurants, theatres and other ‘public accommodations’² which already boycotted African Americans. King searched in vain for a way to manifest such non-violent civil disobedience from 1957 to 1960.

Indeed, by 1957 King realized that he had to deepen his commitment to non-violent resistance because the biggest African American civil rights organization, the NAACP, would not be able to reduce segregation through litigation. Brown v Board of Education (Brown), pronounced by the Supreme Court in 1954, was of course a historic victory for the CRM. Three years on, however, it was becoming evident that the South was not going to implement school desegregation. Tragically, Brown was being honoured more in the breach.

Given the disenchantment with the litigation-centric strategy of the NAACP and given the success of Gandhian methods in Montgomery, it is not surprising that King believed that the time had come to use non-violence to battle segregation on a wider scale. Indeed, by the end of the bus boycott, he was a committed Gandhian. Thanks to the course of events in Montgomery, he attracted the support of many prominent Gandhians such as Bayard Rustin, James Lawson and Harris Wofford, who would work quite closely with him in the years to come.

 

Gandhians like Harris Wofford had been pushing for mass civil disobedience against Jim Crow even before the MBB. In a speech delivered at the Hampton Institute, Wofford called for the use of Gandhian non-violence to combat segregation in the American South. Rustin and Lawson were also deeply familiar with Gandhian philosophy through the course of their education and activism.

Thanks in part to this network of associates, King wasted no time after the MBB. Speaking before his congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church a few days after the victorious conclusion of the Montgomery struggle, he stated: ‘We have just started our work…We must have integrated schools…That is when our race will gain full equality. We cannot rest in Montgomery until every public school is integrated.’³ In addition to publically calling for the integration of Montgomery’s public schools, King also discreetly endorsed Bayard Rustin’s idea for developing ‘a wider civil rights initiative across the South.’⁴ Rustin emphasized that ‘[i]t was vital…that we maintain the psychological momentum Montgomery had generated.’⁵ Thus, King collaborated in earnest with his coterie of Gandhian advisors in the wake of the MBB to transform the South.

 

Their first effort was to organize a conference on 10 and 11 January 1957 titled ‘Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Non-Violent Integration’. In reflecting on the lessons of the Montgomery experience, Rustin made a crucial point – he correctly predicted that Gandhian tactics would be more effective against the segregation of private businesses than state segregation. He also emphasized the need to focus on mass direct action and to break away from the prevailing notion that ordinary people could not play a transformational role in undermining Jim Crow.

Indeed, Rustin’s insight into the fissures in white support of segregation was prescient. During the sit in movement that would break out a few years later, it became clear that lunch counter managers and department store owners, i.e. private businesses, were vulnerable to the frontal assault on segregation by African American students. This was in no small part because of the ‘boycott activism’ the sit ins precipitated. Ordinary students enabled the masses to get involved in a way that did not entail significant risk – they inspired the black community to leverage their economic power and refrain from spending money in stores that used segregated lunch counters. While the students bore the brunt of white retaliation, their older counterparts found a less threatening way to complement such efforts and hurt the bottom line of white businesses. The sit in movement, therefore, involved black communities across the South in a safe and effective way which would not have been possible in a fight against state segregation.

While Rustin correctly identified the way forward to defeat segregation, his insight at the conference was not picked up and developed by King. As the following section will demonstrate, King had his eyes set on convincing the white political establishment to undo state mandated segregation.

 

While the core ideas expressed during the conference emphasized the need to rely on ordinary citizens, King still believed in the importance of lobbying high level government officials. Civil rights scholar Taylor Branch has asserted that ‘King’s foremost idea was that power derived from the stature and prestige of leaders.’⁶ As a result, he sent several telegrams to President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon and Attorney General Brownell upon the conclusion of the conference, calling upon them to demonstrate ‘moral leadership’ in the realm of civil rights. Had he gone in the direction suggested by Rustin, he perhaps would have sought out the opinions of ordinary African Americans.

The disappointment of not hearing back from Eisenhower administration officials spurred King to push for a non-violent ‘Pilgrimage to Washington’ (Pilgrimage). King wanted the Eisenhower administration to take a public stand on the issue of segregation in the South and decided to leverage his growing fame to achieve this goal. The Pilgrimage would consist of marches and speeches aimed at unsettling the placid nonchalance of the government towards the cause of civil rights. Nonetheless it would not involve a frontal assault on segregated institutions in the way that the sit ins would a few years later.

 

While King wanted to move away from the unabashedly top down approach to civil rights reform championed by the NAACP, he still believed in the power of leadership. He believed that ordinary African Americans needed to be represented by capable leaders who would guide the course of the movement. He sought to become such a capable leader, parlaying with the President and other high officials of the U.S. government to secure the rights of his people. Such a perspective on leadership, which focused on ‘summit-like’ engagement with high-level public officials, prevented King from capitalizing on Rustin’s insight about the vulnerability of segregation in the realm of private sector businesses. Otherwise he might have realized as James Lawson did⁷ a few years later how deeply wounded ordinary African American women were by the segregation of department store lunch counters and he might have redirected his efforts away from the unrewarding task of courting the support of white politicians.

Nonetheless, King proceeded to curry their favour through the Pilgrimage, which was timed to coincide with the 3rd anniversary of the Brown decision. Political compulsions altered the complexion of the event from one of criticism of the government to one of support for its voting rights bill. Despite this flawed focus on supporting national level politicians, King burnished his personal reputation. The audience at the Lincoln Memorial greatly appreciated his oratorical skills. Critics also praised his ability to mesmerize crowds and certified his bona fides as a civil rights leader. The boost to King’s popularity even secured him a meeting with President Eisenhower.

 

The President, however, was not a champion of civil rights for African Americans. Even his support of African American voting rights was lukewarm. Consequently, while he engaged in a parley with African American leaders like King behind closed doors, he was not even willing to make a speech in public urging the South to accept the Brown decision.

While King also secured a meeting with Vice President Nixon, here too a chasm separated expectations from results. Through the course of their private interactions, Nixon was warm and generous to King and displayed an understanding of the concerns of African Americans. However, he did not do much in public to advance their cause.

The anemic 1957 Civil Rights Act championed by Eisenhower and Nixon confirmed the ineffectiveness of reposing faith in conventional leaders, as King did, to secure anything more than token gains for African Americans. The law represented an illusory advance in the cause of racial justice thanks to two changes during the drafting stage that reduced its significance to mere symbolism. The jury trial amendment essentially gutted the voting rights protections prevalent in the law’s initial drafts while the provision advancing school desegregation that would have given the enactment some teeth was excised.

King also attempted to use his newly created organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to promote greater registration of African American voters. This pursuit was also a manifestation of the strategy of working with the government, given that African Americans at the time disproportionately favoured the Republican Party. King hoped to gain the support of the Republican Eisenhower administration, therefore, by increasing the rolls of registered black Republicans.

The ‘Crusade for Citizenship’ was launched with great fanfare but it failed to significantly increase the number of registered African American voters. A key problem which the sit ins avoided was the exposure of older African Americans to the danger of retaliation by the white power structure for attempting to register to vote. The cover of anonymity afforded to older blacks by the tactic of economic boycott employed during the sit ins was missing in King’s registration campaign. Here, the identity of blacks who attempted to register would become known to whites. This requirement of open defiance of Southern custom chilled black participation, especially by older blacks and those dependent on whites for their livelihood.

 

King was bereft of ideas. His strategy of securing government support for desegregation by being non-violent, i.e. by pursuing marches, speeches and voter registration drives was not working. He hoped that his trip to India would provide him with some answers – it is said that he ‘wanted time to absorb Gandhism as a discipline that might help him escape a drift towards stagnation as a glorified after dinner speaker.’⁸ To this end, Bayard Rustin supplied King with materials on Gandhi and ‘the latest thinking…in the Gandhi movement.’⁹

However, his India trip also proved to be a disappointment. King engaged with stalwarts such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan and Vinoba Bhave – he attempted to imbibe as much knowledge as possible about Gandhi from them. King wanted to organize an American Salt March and he hoped that interacting with those who best understood Gandhi would furnish him with some insight. Despite his best attempts however he did not find the inspiration he was looking for and left India empty handed.

 

Looking back on this period in King’s life, it seems that a ‘paralysis of analysis’ stymied the pursuit of positive action. There was a great deal of talk about using Gandhian tactics to fight segregation but not much action to translate ideas into practice. Many conferences and workshops were organized, many speeches delivered and many meetings took place, but to no avail. For instance, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) created under the aegis of King’s leadership did little to confront segregation in the city after its seminal bus boycott campaign. There was a lot of discussion among MIA members about targeting segregation at the local airport and in the city’s public parks among other places, but little by way of concrete action.

James Lawson commented on the lack of action during one of the conferences on non-violence organized by King. Amidst a great deal of animated discussion about the finer points of non-violence, Lawson stressed that while theory was useful, it had to be supplemented with positive action. Only then could tangible gains against the system of segregation be realized. Such positive steps were few and far between under King’s leadership in the years after Montgomery.

The following section will demonstrate that while King focused on charismatic leadership, less renowned African American Gandhians sought more egalitarian applications of Gandhian philosophy. Their efforts bore fruit in the form of the sit in tactic. This novel weapon of protest breached the seemingly impenetrable walls of Jim Crow thereby bringing to a close the wilderness years of 1957 to 1960 during which King could do little to undermine the racist status quo.

While it is well known that King travelled to India to become better acquainted with the ways of Gandhi, it is not well known that Gandhian ideas travelled to the United States well before King’s time. Gandhi was a pervasive presence in African American journals and newspapers for many years before King became a prominent political personality. For several decades after the First World War, in fact, African American journalists, scholars and activists debated the relevance of Gandhian techniques to the African American struggle against white supremacy.

 

This sustained exposure to Gandhi spurred the civil rights organization, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, to deploy non-violent civil disobedience in the struggle against racial segregation. CORE began by employing the sit in tactic in Chicago, becoming perhaps the first American organization to translate the ‘thin paper’ of Gandhian theory to ‘thick action’. Indeed, ‘at the outset CORE adopted two guiding principles that remained viable for the next two decades: a commitment to non-violent direct action on the Ghandian [sic] model, and an equally strong insistence upon inter-racial efforts to attain the goal of a fully integrated, equalitarian society.’¹⁰

Through its sit in campaign of the 1940s, CORE brought about the desegregation of restaurants in the North which were in violation of state public accommodation laws. CORE continued to deploy the sit in tactic to oppose segregation in public accommodations into the 1950s, gradually extending its protests into the South.

 

Howard University students, led by the Gandhian civil rights activist Pauli Murray, also deployed the sit in tactic in the 1940s ‘at segregated restaurants in the nation’s capital.’¹¹ By the late 1950s some NAACP youth groups were also using the sit in tactic to oppose segregation (much to the chagrin of the national leadership of the organization). They received assistance from the pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which possessed a deep knowledge of Gandhian principles.

James Lawson was nurturing a non-violent cadre of his own in Nashville in the late 1950s to challenge department store lunch counter segregation through sit ins. In fact ‘participants in Lawson’s workshops read Gandhi and studied the Indian freedom struggle while preparing to launch nonviolent civil disobedience.’¹²

This stream of Gandhi inspired sit ins taking place in the years before and after the MBB confirms that King was only one of many African Americans inspired by the Father of India. It also confirms the seminal contribution of African American Gandhians other than King to the development of the preeminent direct action tactic of the CRM: the sit in.

When the ‘Greensboro Four’¹³ decided to sit in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on 1 February 1960, therefore, they were building on a legacy of Gandhian sit ins. Indeed, the Greensboro Four had been exposed to Gandhian non-violence only a few months before launching their epoch defining challenge to segregation. The scholar Nico Slate points out that ‘[t]he four students had seen a documentary on Gandhi a few months earlier and had read some of Gandhi’s writings while discussing what they could do to challenge segregation.’¹⁴

 

This seemingly spontaneous, student-led movement did not therefore come out of nowhere. It came about as a result of the foundation laid by an earlier generation of African American Gandhians and because of the effect of Gandhi on the students themselves. The support that students in numerous southern cities received from older African American Gandhians once the sit in movement commenced, testifies to the bond between the 1960 movement and the earlier sit in campaigns, and to the way in which Gandhi inspired the development of the sit in tactic.

The sit ins shattered the stagnancy that had come to define the post Montgomery phase of the CRM. The movement galvanized over fifty thousand students across the South to disregard the long-standing custom of segregation in lunch counters without engaging in violence. As a result of students’ fidelity to Gandhian principles, numerous attempts by rowdy whites to provoke a physical confrontation with those politely seeking integrated lunch service did not work. The dedicated application of Gandhian ideals by African American students even emboldened them to ‘fill the jails’ of the South.

This unyielding display of courage and sacrifice stiffened the resolve of older blacks who were otherwise wary of directly confronting segregation. It paved the way for them to get involved in the cause of integrated lunch counters through the medium of an economic boycott of white owned stores. While ordinary African Americans lacked the political leverage to push for school desegregation and voting rights, they had by 1960 amassed enough economic power to persuade white businesses to abandon racist practices like lunch counter segregation. The application of Gandhian ideals by students created a situation in which such economic muscle could be flexed to advance the cause of desegregation. Furthermore, engaging in an economic boycott of white owned businesses did not entail the risk of white retaliation unlike King’s Crusade for Citizenship.

 

Thus, a grassroots movement of ordinary African American students paved the way for the CRM to defeat segregation. In directly defying the most sacrosanct feature of the southern racial order while also reversing the opposition of older blacks’ to civil rights activism, black college students furnished King and others with a road map for how to defeat white supremacy in a Gandhian way. King’s struggle to articulate such a path of resistance to segregation in the years after Montgomery does not feature in conventional accounts of civil rights narratives – consequently, an attempt has been made here to remedy this oversight.

 

Footnotes:

1. The sit in movement consisted of African American students seating themselves at lunch counters designated for whites only. In seeking to eat a hamburger or drink a cup of coffee at these segregated lunch counters, student activists were defying the conventional mores of the American South. When such defiance provoked violent outbursts from white onlookers, students sustained the blows that befell them without responding in kind, i.e. they responded non-violently in the mold of their ‘patron saint’, Mahatma Gandhi (Nico Slate, Coloured Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2017, p. 230.

2. Privately owned businesses and facilities used by the general public.

3. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. William Morrow Paperbacks, New York, 2004, p. 64.

4. Ibid., p. 65.

5. Ibid., p. 65.

6. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989, p. 212.

7. Lawson used this insight to hone in on department store lunch counters as the site for his highly successful desegregation campaign in Nashville, Tennessee in 1960.

8. Taylor Branch, 1989, op. cit., p. 250.

9. Taylor Branch, 1989, op. cit., p. 250.

10. Maxwell Bloomfield, Review of the book CORE: A Study of the Civil Rights Movement 1942-1968 by August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Catholic University Law Review, 1974, p. 639.

11. Nico Slate, 2017, op. cit., p. 228.

12. Nico Slate, 2017, op. cit., p. 229.

13. This is a reference to the first batch of African American sit-inners in Greensboro, North Carolina who inaugurated the movement. This batch comprised four freshmen at North Carolina A&T University: Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond.

14. Nico Slate, 2017, op. cit., p. 228.

 

References:

Christopher W. Schmidt, The Sit Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

David Halberstam, The Children. Random House, New York, 1998.

Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi. Beacon Press, Boston, 1992.