January 20 is MLK Day. On this day we honor the extraordinary life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was a tireless civil rights advocate. He spent his life fighting for fair treatment and equal rights for Black Americans.
Dr. King was also an avid reader. He had an enormous personal library filled with more than a thousand books. He read a wide variety of texts. He studied the Bible and the writings of ancient philosophers. He enjoyed stories, plays, and poems. He also read historical documents, biographies, essays, letters, and speeches. Dr. King’s own ideas about the world were influenced by his favorite writers. His writing often contained quotes from and references to texts he had read.
Mahatma Gandhi was an activist from India. He was a leader of India’s independence movement in the early 1900s. He encouraged Indian people to fight for independence from the British. He believed it could be done without using violence. Gandhi called this approach “nonviolent resistance.” Dr. King never met Gandhi, but he read Gandhi’s writings. King was deeply influenced by Gandhi’s ideas about nonviolent resistance. These ideas became the basis for King’s own peaceful approach to fighting for civil rights in the United States. King wrote about Gandhi as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”
Inspired by Gandhi’s example, Dr. King encouraged Black people to stand up for their rights using peaceful actions. These actions included boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. Like Gandhi, Dr. King believed that peaceful protest was the only way to defeat the violence of racism.
What Do You Think? How has something you have read inspired you or changed the way you see the world?
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