Featured exhibit · From the Archive
Eleven years after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King traveled through India to study his methods at the source. Dr. King later wrote about it for Ebony magazine. The center holds that article and fourteen photographs from the trip.
In February 1959, Dr. King wrote in his journal: "To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim." He and Coretta traveled through India for roughly five weeks, meeting with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Vinoba Bhave, Jayaprakash Narayan, members of Gandhi's family, and the Indian leaders carrying his work forward. They walked the sites of the Salt March. They visited Sabarmati Ashram. They sat with the methods that would shape the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Birmingham, and the March on Washington in the years immediately ahead.
The trip is one of the most consequential journeys in twentieth-century American history. It is also, despite that, surprisingly poorly preserved in widely accessible archives.
Dr. King published his account of the trip in Ebony magazine in July 1959 under the title "My Trip to the Land of Gandhi." The article is, to date, the most widely-cited primary source on the visit.
Original copies of the issue are rare. When the Gandhi-King Center sought a clean copy of the article to display, even the Stanford MLK Institute, the canonical scholarly repository for Dr. King's papers, could supply only a near-illegible scan. The center digitally restored the pages individually, framed each one for archival display, and produces color-printed copies for free distribution at Season for Nonviolence events.
A downloadable PDF of the restored article will be made available here for free educational use.
The center also holds fourteen high-resolution photographs from the Kings' India trip, accompanied by an accompanying short film. The collection is being prepared for web presentation; the gallery will appear here as the photographs are digitized to web-appropriate resolution.
Gallery in preparation. Fourteen photographs and a contemporary film will be installed here as conservation-quality digitization completes. To request advance access for academic or curatorial purposes, contact the center.
Most accounts of Dr. King's intellectual formation start with Reinhold Niebuhr at Crozer and end with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The India trip sits in between, and it changed everything that came after it. To put it plainly: the methods Dr. King brought home from India are the methods that won the civil rights movement.
The trip also produced one of the few moments in twentieth-century history where the philosophical heir of Mahatma Gandhi was physically present in the country and the household tradition Gandhi built. That a clean copy of his published account is hard to find is itself a fact worth knowing. We hold what we can.