Exit strategy Crisis, The - Find Articles

Exit strategy Crisis, The - Find Articles

as I noted in W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, "the appearance of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott had been something of a puzzle for Du Bois." He observed somewhere that he had expected to live to see anything but a militant Baptist preacher. In the Indian journal Gandhi Marg, Du Bois drew obvious parallels between Gandhi's liberation of India and King's success in Alabama, and went on to speculate that the gifted, committed preacher might be the American Gandhi. King wrote a grateful note in response to the Du Boises' letter supporting the Montgomery boycott. But nonviolent passive resistance devoid of an economic agenda increasingly disappointed Du Bois, and he finally decided in late 1959 that King was not Gandhi: "Gandhi submitted," Du Bois asserted, "but he also followed a positive [economic] program to offset his negative refusal to use violence."