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International Legacy

Gandhi was admired by African-American leaders in the US from the 1920s onwards, and Marcus Garvey and WEB du Bois publicised his works. A delegation led by Howard Thurman, a Baptist minister, theologian, and academic from the American South, met with Gandhi in 1936. Bayard Rustin and trade unionist A Philip Randolph formed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago in 1942. CORE staged non-violent protests against racist employment practices in Chicago, and Rustin was jailed for three years when, as a conscientious objector, he refused to serve in the army during WWII.

Gandhi proved to be a major influence on Martin Luther King, who rushed out to buy as many books as he could on Gandhi after listening to a lecture by Mordecai Johnson on non-violent resistance. King and Rustin were the prime movers behind the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, which reached its height in period from 1963 to 1967.

Gandhi also inspired liberation fighters in Africa, and the Fifth Pan-African Congress, which met in Manchester in 1945, ‘endorsed Gandhian passive resistance as the preferred method for resistance to colonialism in Africa’. Kwame Nkruma explicitly cited Gandhi as an influence, and while Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere never fully accepted the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence, they used the concept to guide their political struggles.

In France, Lanza Del Vasto, who had lived with Gandhi in the 1930s at an ashram in India, founded a Gandhi-inspired organization, the Communities of the Ark. Del Vasto fasted for twenty days in 1957 to end the torture of Algerians by the French military.

The 1980s saw a reawakening of the principle of non-violent struggle, with groups in Poland (the Solidarity movement), Chile, the Philippines, Palestine (the Intifada movement), China and Burma (Aung San Suu Kyi) adopting Gandhian methods of resistance to oppressive laws.

Other movements also used Gandhian ideas. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament cited Gandhi as an influence in its struggle to urge nations to reject the use of nuclear weapons. Environmental movements such as Greenpeace have used non-violence as a method to fight their battles against nuclear proliferation and ecological destruction. The German Green party leader Petra Kelly, an activist against nuclear weapons, has spoken of her admiration for Gandhi, ML King and David Thoreau. She said:

In one particular area of our political work we have been greatly inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. That is in our belief that a lifestyle and method of production which rely on an endless supply of raw materials and which use those raw materials lavishly, also furnish the motive for the violent appropriation of raw materials from other countries. In contrast, a responsible use of raw materials, as part of an ecologically-oriented lifestyle and economy, reduces the risk that policies of violence will be pursued in our name.