Threads of Peace by Uma Krishnaswami

Author:Uma Krishnaswami
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

He did. The visit confirmed what King had already begun to believe. Oppressed people everywhere want the same things: freedom, justice, equality, peace.

By the time they left India, King and his party had crisscrossed the Indian subcontinent. They flew over long stretches from north to south, traveled by train for shorter distances, reached remote places by car and jeep. They went to the southernmost tip of India, where some of Gandhi’s ashes had been scattered in the sea. Everywhere they went, they were besieged by reporters. Photographs of them were splashed across the front pages of India’s newspapers. Autograph seekers mobbed the group. When they traveled by plane, even the pilots came out from the cockpit into the cabin, wanting autographs.

Speaking for Coretta and Lawrence as well as for himself, King called the trip “one of the most concentrated and eye-opening experiences of our lives.”

On his return to the United States, King spoke and wrote about his travels in India. On Palm Sunday, back in his pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he gave a sermon. On this holy day, the start of Easter, he would usually have spoken about Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem, riding a donkey, with people scattering palm fronds in his path. But India was still on King’s mind. He said, “I beg of you to indulge me this morning to talk about the life of a man who lived in India. And I think I’m justified in doing this because I believe this man, more than anybody else in the modern world, caught the spirit of Jesus Christ and lived it more completely in his life.”

He quoted Gandhi, saying, “If you are hit, don’t hit back; even if they shoot at you, don’t shoot back; if they curse you, don’t curse back, but just keep moving. Some of us might have to die before we get there; some of us might be thrown in jail before we get there, but let us just keep moving.” As a youngster, he’d longed to put his body where his mind was. Now his words combined the powers of mind, body, and soul.

The congregation murmured and sighed and cried, “Yes, yes!” as King wove his words around those other words from the man in whose footsteps he had made this pilgrimage to India. Martin Luther King Jr. was only thirty years old.

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