King’s nonviolence doctrine blended Gandhian influence with Christian theology

Evidence

The Montgomery bus boycott highlighted King’s rhetorical skill, as well as his message of nonviolent action. It lasted for just over a year, during which King was arrested and his home firebombed. Speaking after the bombing, King urged his followers to “meet violence with nonviolence.” Though his message had been honed by his undergraduate mentor Benjamin Mays, the president of Morehouse College, whose study of Gandhian nonviolence influenced King’s doctoral work at Boston University, it was also informed by Christian theology: The movement attracted young divinity school scholars like James Lawson, a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, who organized the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and John Lewis and C. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1042

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running thesis that Black institutions (here the church) were foundational carriers of resistance, and the reader’s interest in lineage/intellectual genealogy as origin stories.