Category: Recovering History

‘Gandhi Would Be Grieved By India’s Treatment Of Civil Disobedience Today’

In this interview, Mary Elizabeth King, an expert on nonviolent resistance, discussed how Mohandas Gandhi’s civil disobedience influenced the American civil rights movement, and what he might think of India today. NEW DELHI — The United States and India, the world’s oldest and largest democracies, have been punishing their citizens for using civil disobedience to…
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November 15, 2020 0

How South Africa forced Gandhi to reckon with racism and imperialism

By. Mary Elizabeth King Gandhi recuperating at the home of the Rev. J.J. Doke, Gandhi’s first biographer, in Johannesburg, after having been assaulted on February 10, 1908. (Wikimedia)   Born 150 years ago, Gandhi’s perceptions about human sensibilities, social power and political truths began their transformation not in India, but South Africa. Born 150 years…
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October 7, 2019 0

Remembering Vaikom satyagraha in the light of Sabarimala [Hindu Temple]

By Ramachandra Guha, The News Minute, Sunday, January 06, 2019. In the last week of January 1924—fully 95 years ago—two radicals in Kerala formed an ‘Anti-Untouchability Committee’. They were TK Madhavan, a journalist and a follower of the great Shri Narayana Guru; and KP Kesava Menon, a Congressman and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. In the months…
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January 18, 2019 0

Rev. James Lawson on Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act – 50 Years Later

In the 1950s, Rev. James Lawson of Ohio went to India as a Methodist missionary. There, he studied “satyagraha,” a set of principles and methods of nonviolent resistance developed by Mohandas Gandhi. In 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King asked Rev. Lawson to assist the nonviolent resistance movement for civil rights by sharing satyagraha with activists,…
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April 6, 2018 0

“Movement Schools” and Dialogical Diffusion of Nonviolent Praxis: Nashville Workshops in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

By Larry W. Isaac,  Daniel B. Cornfield,  Dennis C. Dickerson,  James M. Lawson,  Jonathan S. Coley. While it is generally well-known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the U.S. southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semi-structured interviews…
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August 1, 2017 0

Gandhi’s Paradox : The Warrior and the Pacifist

By Lester R. Kurtz. CONVENTIONAL wisdom assumes that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao put it, or is given to those who steer a course down the mainstream. Mahatma Gandhi, however, is a “counterplayer” whose success lies not in accepting dominant paradigms but in challenging them. Most of the world’s…
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August 1, 2017 0

Women and Civil Rights : A Personal Reflection

By Mary Elizabeth King. BACKGROUND In 1838, when the Antislavery Convention of American Women adopted a policy of using sit-ins and protest rides to resist slavery in the United States (Mabee, 1970, p. 115), it underlined the importance of refusing to cooperate with that cruel and inhumane system and foreshadowed the crucial role of women…
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August 1, 2017 0

Women in Civil Resistance

By Anne-Marie Codur and Mary Elizabeth King. Recent scholarship has revealed contributions of women throughout the ages to the development of nonviolent methods for waging conficts. The fndings are unearthing a version of history in which women’s involvement has been conducive to the use and expansion of civil resistance and nonviolent struggle. With women, until…
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August 1, 2017 0

The United States: Reconsidering the Struggle for Independence, 1765–1775

  By  Walter H. Conser Jr. Stories of national origin provide conceptions of national identity for the people who share them. They celebrate the charter events of a people, enshrine particular historical episodes, and privilege specific historical interpretations. People in the United States, by eulogizing stories of violence in their national origin, have effaced or…
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July 30, 2017 0

Oakland: The Rev. James Lawson, a longtime nonviolent activist, practices what he preaches

The Rev. James Lawson addresses the audience at the Allen Temple Baptist Church at a commemorative service for Martin Luther King Jr. By LOU FANCHER OAKLAND — The use of violence as a means to gain freedom or to protect a citizenship never fulfills its promises to humanity, the Rev. James Lawson said. “World War I…
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July 18, 2017 0