Work · Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.)
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Account of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56; the chapter “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” traces his path through Thoreau, Rauschenbusch, Marx and Nietzsche to Gandhi, then to Niebuhr’s objections and his Boston teachers, and sets out six principles of nonviolent resistance.
Introduction
King’s first book appeared in 1958, two years after the end of the Montgomery bus boycott. Most of it tells the story of the boycott: the arrest of Rosa Parks, the founding of the Montgomery Improvement Association with King as its president, car pools, arrests and the bombing of his house, until the Supreme Court’s ruling against segregation on the buses. The chapter “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” describes his intellectual path through Thoreau, Rauschenbusch, Marx and Nietzsche to Gandhi, followed by Niebuhr’s critique of pacifism and the personalism and Hegel studies of his Boston years, and states the principles of nonviolent resistance: it resists evil actively but without violence, seeks to win the understanding of the opponent, attacks injustice rather than persons, accepts suffering without retaliating, refuses inner as well as outer violence and trusts that the universe is on the side of justice.
Connections
Builds on
- Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience)1849 · Henry David Thoreau
More works by Martin Luther King Jr.
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