Gandhi's Sword in Alabama

Thousands of Negroes in Montgomery, Alabama, are engaged in one of the most significant experiments in U.S. race relations as they continue their so-called "passive resistance" campaign against the segregation laws on city busses. Now over three months old, the boycott represents a dramatically new technique in this country's race problem.

Actually, attempts to disobey a law in support of some larger cause are not at all unknown in American history. The Underground Railroad before the Civil War was clearly designed to side-track the Fugitive Slave Law and speed escaping slaves to Canada. Suffragettes, too, were willing to break ordinance after ordinance to extend the vote.

Even if America's past, including especially Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," presents precedents for the Montgomery boycott, the deeper inspiration for the current campaign is clearly India's Gandhi. For here was a man who dramatized the technique of non-violent civil disobedience and used it as a weapon against three powerful forces: first in the fight against racial intolerance in the Union South Africa from 1906 to 1915; then in the struggle against the British which lasted until independence in 1947; and finally, until his assassination in 1948, in an heroic and saintly attempt to bring peace out of the bloody Hindu-Muslim riots over the partition of free India. As the forger of this non-violent sword, Gandhi offers important lessons to those in this country who now are continuing his struggle.

Gandhi called his version of civil disobedience "Satyagraha," or Soul Force. The word comes from satya, meaning truth, and agraha, meaning firmness. The former implies love, Gandhi wrote, and the latter, force; in other words, Satyagraha is "the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence." "Satyagraha," Gandhi explained, "postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one's own person," and it demands that every civil resister disobey a law that is counter to his own conscience and cheerfully to demand the punishment for breaking the law. This weapon, which was to shake the British Empire, relied not on the love of force, which had characterized so many previous revolutions, but on the force of love. Gandhi's emphasis was therefore solidly on a forceful, but non-violent, struggle: it was anything but "passive resistance."

This high-sounding concept actually emerged out of the specific problems in the Union of South Africa. There the large Indian minority of 100,000 held second-class status: they were subjected to rigid segregation, contemptuously called coolies, and were forced to register under the hated "Black Act." On Sept. 11, 1906, a large meeting of Indians heard Gandhi describe the consequences of the first pledge to disobey the Black Act. Each man, he said, must be willing to undergo the fight in complete isolation, if necessary, or else the pledge is meaningless. This is one of the basic principles of Satyagraha: success depends not upon numbers but upon individual firmness. The audience responded, Satyagraha was born, and Gandhi and hundreds of others went to jail for the first time.

Gandhi's jail-going was primarily pointed at limited objectives, such as the repeal of the anti-Asiatic registration. In South Africa, when some of his followers pleaded with him to extend the struggle into new areas, he stood his ground: "In a pure fight the fighters would never go beyond the objective fixed when the fight began," he said, "even if they received an accession to their strength in course of fighting, or on the other hand they could not give up their objective if they found their strength dwindling away."

Gandhi was also willing to compromise. Even in his first struggle against the Black Act, he did not insist on an all-or-nothing solution. After receiving substantial concessions from Jan Christian Smuts, Gandhi agreed to ask the Indians to register voluntarily. Why not register, he told them, if we do it freely? Gandhi was the first to register, but he was brutally clubbed by one of his own countrymen who felt registration would sacrifice principle. To Gandhi, this trust in Smuts' word was the essence of Satyagraha, for "the Satyagrahi bids good-bye to fear," he wrote. "Even if the opponent plays him false twenty times, the Satyagrahi is ready to trust him for the twenty-first time, for an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed."

If such trusting, non-violent resistance is half of Gandhi's creed, the other half is creative, practical service for immediate problems. In South Africa he set to work cleaning up the Indian community, founded a cooperative educational farm and instructed the Indians in sanitation. Later, when he was doing the same type of service in India, he washed the latrines before a meeting of independence leaders, and drily asked why they should "wait till the advent of swarai (self-rule) for the neccessary drain-cleaning?"

Gandhi could turn from constructive service to civil disobedience overnight, depending on his acute awareness of the temper of the people, whether in South Africa or in India. His fasts and his spinning and his marches all were attuned to what he knew the Indians would respond to. Satyagraha, under Gandhi's quiet leadership, was hard to stop, for in the minds of Indians, he had effectively changed Truth into Action. When the leaders and supporters of the Montgomery boycott plan the rest of their current campaign, a few additional thoughts on Gandhi's Satyagraha--its strength, its limited goals, its constructive service, and above all, its firm yet flexible leader--might be in order.