A Story about MLK

When Stephanie and I and some friends visited Mani Bhavan in 2014, the big, comfortable house that was Mahatma Gandhi’s headquarters in Mumbai, we were told an amazing story. When Martin Luther King visited here on his tour of India in 1959 he insisted on entering the sealed room when the Mahatma slept, and even more against the rules wanted to spend the night in that hallowed space. It caused the custodians no small consternation, but they did not feel they could say no to this man. When he finally came down in the morning he said to the group of greatly relieved custodians, “Now I can go back to my country and do my work.”

Rather than celebrating the anniversary of his death, let’s raise our voices to give praise and deep gratitude to the accomplishment of his life.

For he did much more even than raise people up with his vision and courage: he showed us that we have to rethink the meaning of our life and the direction of our civilization.

This is the underlying meaning, I believe, bequeathed to us by his legacy: that we must today even more than in 1968 recognize how we are defining ourselves as individuals and a people by the choice, as he put it, “between nonviolence and non-existence.”