When the
bus company was finally compelled to capitulate and to drop its
policy of segregated seating, King had become a national hero.
Mass resistance, including some forms of civil disobedience,
became popular as the best way to achieve racial change.
King had already given considerable thought to the question of
how best to achieve social change, and, more important, to do it
within the framework of moral law. His experiences with direct
action techniques in Montgomery helped him to confirm and to
further elaborate his thinking. His philosophy had been
influenced by the writings of Henry Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi
with the result that he developed an ideology of nonviolent
resistance. Like Gandhi, King wanted to make clear that
nonviolence was not the same as nonresistance. Both maintained
that if it should come to a choice between submission and
violence, violence was to be preferred. Both stressed that
nonviolent resistance was not to be an excuse for cowardice. To
the contrary, nonviolent resistance was the way of the strong. It
meant the willingness to accept suffering but not the intention
to inflict it.
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