Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter With Gandhi

by Sudarshan Kapur

Argues that Gandhi, rather than Martin Luther King, Jr., introduced the concept of nonviolence to American Blacks, and looks at the civil rights movement

222 pages, Hardcover

Reviews

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone interested in the genealogy of non-violent struggle for social justice and/or in how the ideas and tactics of struggles in one time and place may be shared into another. Kapur's thesis is that between 1919 and 1955 African-American intellectuals and political organizers followed Gandhi's campaigns closely, debated the meaning of those campaigns for their own struggle, and educated the African-American community about them. They did this by means of traveling to India to talk with Gandhi and study his methods, hosting Gandhian emissaries to the US, theorizing the similarities between Satyagraha and the philosophy of Jesus, organizing international communities of non-white peoples, adapting Gandhi's methods for their own experiments with protest and civil disobedience, and most importantly by reporting on, and debating Gandhi in leading African-American newspapers. Thus, Kapur argues, "by way of discussion, debate, and activism in the decades leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott, [these leaders] helped to create the circumstances that made possible the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr." -- in essence "Raising Up a Prophet."

One of the most important lessons to be learned from this study (and from the new biography of Rosa Parks) is that social change is usually the work of a community of thinkers and organizers who theorize their experience of injustice, study and experiment with a range of potential solutions, and raise up leaders to help effect them. This is in contrast to the messianic narratives of leaders who spring up out of nowhere, with self-contained genius and courage, to show their communities what needs to be done. Kapur's counter-narrative in no way detracts from King's genius or courage but grounds both in the cooperative intelligence and daring of his multi-generational community.