Concluding Remarks at Gandhi Statue, September 9th 2007.

By Harris Wofford

You cannot march in the spirit of Martin Luther King and end in front of the wonderful statue of Gandhi striding forward during the Salt March without thinking of the historic connection between those two men of the 20th century. Thank you for asking me to take you back in history to see how the combination of Gandhi and King made history.

“Come to America,” Dr. Howard Thurman urged Gandhi in 1935. The then dean of the chapel at Howard University, with his wife and a small group of other black Americans visiting Gandhi added that he believed “it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”

But Gandhi said he could not move out to the world stage until he felt the call within. “I must make good the message here before I bring it to you.”

That call never came, and Gandhi died midst the violence of partition thinking his message had failed in India. He had said, “Vivisect me but not India.” He did not live to see the day when a Black American delivered the unadulterated message of nonviolence not only to Americans of all colors but to the world. Or to know that it was a woman, Rosa Parks, whose arrest and jail-going led to Martin Luther King being asked to lead the year-long boycott of the buses in Montgomery.

Rose Parks herself said that the message of Gandhi was a key source of her inspiration to say No to giving up her seat and saying Yes to jail. She explained that she had willingly accepted jail in December 1955 because that summer at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee she had taken a workshop on Gandhi and non-violence. She said she put in the back of her mind the thought that someday she might undertake non-violent resistance, and that day came when the bus driver threatened to send her to jail. She sat still and said, “Then you may do it.”

Without that courageous nonviolence of Rosa Parks there is no reason to think that Martin Luther King would have come to the center of the American stage, and indeed in due course to the stage of the world.

Rose Parks did not know that the Gandhian workshop she took was added to the Highlander curriculum after a visit to Highlander in the summer of 1951 by a persuasive champion and follower of Gandhi who castigated the school for having nothing on nonviolence or Gandhi in its program.

“Our century has thought twice,” Dr. Rammanohar Lohia told the faculty and students of Highlander: “Once with Einstein and once with Gandhi.” Einstein had pointed the way to harnessing and releasing the physical forces of the universe, for better or worse. Gandhi had pointed the way to harnessing peacefully applying the power of people.

Before Lohia left Highlander the school’s founder promised to add Gandhi to the curriculum. Not long after our visit Miles Horton sent me the outline, to forward to Lohia, of the new workshop on nonviolence that Rosa Parks was soon to take.
So the Gandhian circle grows. King wrote later in his book on the Montgomery story that Rosa Parks “had been tracked down by the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the time.”
That was just as true for King himself.

In his first and most personal book, Strive Towards Freedom, King describes what he called his Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. During his student days at Morehouse he had read and re-read Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience, and then while at Crozer Theological Seminary one Sunday in 1949 he went to hear a sermon on Mahatma Gandhi by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, who had just returned from India. King wrote that Johnson’s message was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and his works.”

King, too, put in the back of his head the thought that someday he might practice some of what Gandi preached. But in his book, he writes that “When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis in which nonviolent resistance would be applicable. I neither started the protest nor suggested it. I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman. When the protest began, my mind, consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime teachings on love, and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. As the days unfolded, I came to see the power of nonviolence more and more. Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.”

Gandhi liked to say that he was a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew and a Christian – and he would have loved the congregations you represent here today. He often said that his aim in life was “to live the Sermon on the Mount.” In the Montgomery bus boycott and the seasons of suffering and civil disobedience that followed, King showed how to live that Sermon. He, too, had been tracked down by history.

Let me close with a personal story. Not long after the boycott, my wife Clare and I drove Martin and Coretta King from Baltimore to Washington, DC. Clare and I had written a book on Gandhi and India in its birth as a free nation, in which in 1951 we had called for a Gandhian action to become a central part of the American campaign for civil rights. We had tried to follow the Gandhian trail in India the year after his assassination.

Before the boycott, King had read one of my papers, and later would joke that I was the one volunteer lawyer on his team who would help him to go to jail instead of using all the tricks of the trade to keep him out.
On the drive back from Baltimore, Martin and I were strategizing about next steps in the movement when from the backseat we heard Coretta say to Clare that she had a recurring nightmare that at the end of the road Martin had chosen, he would be killed.

Martin turned back and said to her to put the nightmare out of her mind and think of what we can do while we are here. “Remember that I didn’t choose this course,” he said. “They asked me, and I said yes.” Then he sang lines from a spiritual that went something like: “The lord came by and asked, and my soul said yes.”

By your marching together today, you are showing by your feet that you, too, have been tracked down by the spirit that our times, now more than ever, need. Your souls, too, are saying Yes.

Changing our community starts with learning how to change our selves first. As the fences, walls and boundaries that divide our world disintegrate daily, we search for a new way to live in our growing multicultural and interconnected world. This, I think is the central message of the Unity Walk; that we must create new ways of communicating across these lines of difference and start dialogue that takes us beyond the superficial sharing of what we have in common to the higher call of, what can we achieve together?

After three years of organizing the UW with so many concerned citizens, the "walk" has turned into a tradition for the DC community. Every month we gather for planning meetings at a different house of worship where planners set agendas, debate and dialogue on issues we choose to explore, on the speakers to be invited, on the program and we serve as a clearninghouse for people to stay active and invovled in service and community events.

Each meeting offers planners a venue to learn about a different religious tradition, to dialogue about issues of justice, peace and conflict resolution and to share their stories.

For me, the walk has really changed my life. From teaching myself how to build a website, to dealing with "high profile" politics of the religious leaders we have involved in the walk, to facilitating planning meetings with diverse community members, I've found my passion through this experience. What I've loved most about the Unity Walk is the sheer passion each faith community has brought to the planning table - this passion has been the cornerstone of our success.

The "walk" has existed as a labor of love - bringing dynamic public leaders to it purely based on it's core purpose and message... and we have refined this process, which started in 2005, almost spontaneously, when about 50 concerned community members came together at different houses of worship to plan the walk, envisioned in the spirit of MLKs civil rights walks and Gandhi's marches.

By this point, after three years of Unity Walks and thousands of people having come together in a spirit of peace and reconciliation, a vibrant planning community of well over 200 people has been formed, the Unity Walk has expanded to New York and we have gained international media attention. Most interesting is our street reputation, when I tell people about it, they typically say, "yeah I've heard of that..."

When we found out the Unity Walk had been selected to the top 100, our core planning team was ecstatic with joy, we began to meet nightly, going through countless revisions to the application and consulting as many people as we can...

Our vision is simple: we want to see the Unity Walk event and planning style exported to over a dozen new communities outside of Washington, DC and New York by 2009. We want to provide the resources, guidance and seed money to local partnering organizations to enable them to bring together diverse groups and organize a Unity Walk, which will culminate in a new 'Seasons of Service' from 9/11 to the birth of the United Nations on 9/21 - this idea I don't take credit for what so ever, in fact, it was created largely by our planning process, a testament to the power and creativity of our consensus driven planning.

The 'Seasons of Service' period would involve each faith community in the planning team to commit to a number of service projects, whereby they would lead and involve others from their local Unity Walk network in the act of serving their community.

Wish us luck!!