The Teaching Company is offering a free 50-minute lecture by Professor Dennis Dalton (Barnard) on Martin Luther King, Jr. called Stride Toward Freedom. It's particularly interesting to learn how King was introduced to, and consciously began carrying out, Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolent protest. According to Dalton, King headed up the Montgomery bus boycott because the movement needed a spokesman, but, despite being a believer in Gandhi's methods, he had no larger Gandhian strategy in mind when the boycott started. In fact, the term they used at the time was a doctrine of "Christian love." It was a librarian named Juliet Morgan in Montgomery, AL who, in a series of letters to the editor of the Montgomery paper, first linked the Montgomery bus boycott with Gandhi's beliefs of nonviolent protest. Dalton quotes King as saying:
Miss Juliette Morgan, sensitive and frail, did not long survive the rejection and condemnation of the white community, but long before she died in the summer of 1957, the name of Mahatma Gandhi was well known in Montgomery.
Dalton says that he wishes more was known about Morgan and what happened to her, but a google search yielded a remarkable story about a very bold woman who risked her income, her friends, her family and reputation on fighting the injustices of racism in the best ways she could. Sadly, the ostracism became too much for her, and she killed herself in 1957. But as someone who helped King translate Gandhi's civil disobedience to the civil rights movement, her legacy is large.
The lecture is free to listen to and download until Feb. 2.
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