It was uncanny that President Obama’s acceptance speech was given on the 45th anniversary of the famous speech Dr. Martin Luther King delivered at the March on Washington. It is as if Barack Obama were the embodiment of one of the powerful visions that Dr. King articulated that day—his aspiration for his children.
“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But what I really want to talk about is not Obama, nor King, but a figure I see in the background—literally—in the background. You can see his portrait in the frame on the wall behind Dr. King in this photo.
Mahatma Ghandi, the man in the picture, has been one of the most profoundly positive influences on mankind in the last century. I suspect that his teaching of passive resistance liberated more humans non-violently than have been liberated by war. He was a brilliant, insightful strategist and a great soul. I read his biography when I was fourteen, and my life was forever changed by what I learned. But Ghandi’s influence was more notably a major influence on Dr. King (and Nelson Mandella’s as well). In fact, Dr. King went to India to meet the great man’s family in 1959 (Ghandi himself had been assassinated in 1948), and in a radio address on his last day there he said:
“Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”*
So, not only did Mahatma Ghandi liberate India from the tyranny of British domination, he taught a non-violent approach that would greatly influence those who would work to end segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. It is through his influence and the work of Dr. King and that of thousands and thousands of other people, many who are no longer living.
And while I find it difficult to imagine the humble Mahatma Ghandi or the dignified Dr. King giving each other high-fives in heaven, I suspect that there was a whole lot of cheering going on in those realms the night President Obama was elected.
*King, Jr., Martin Luther; Clayborne Carson; Peter Holloran; Ralph Luker; Penny A. Russell (1992). The papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., University of California Press, 135-136. ISBN 0520079507.
