On August 16th, 1908, in Johannesburg, South Africa, a lawyer from India named Mohandas Gandhi spoke to a crowd of more than three thousand. These Indian men he had helped organize were protesting a recent South African law that would force them to register as foreigners in the country. Two years of mass meetings and rallies led up to this event at which Gandhi and his followers broke the law by burning their registration papers. No one had any idea that these actions marked the beginning of a movement that would change the world.
In South Africa, Gandhi defined the philosophy and developed the tactics he would use over the next forty years to lead the unarmed people of India in a nonviolent uprising against the British Empire. Using nothing but their bodies,
their intelligence, and their wills, these Indian laborers, housewives, shopkeepers, and students challenged a well-armed military force that had occupied their country for three hundred years. The world had never seen anything like it.
Gandhi was not the first leader to use nonviolent methods to challenge injustice, but he developed new strategies involving tens of thousands of people in mass actions and demonstrated the power of nonviolence on a scale never seen before.
Gandhi became the father of modern nonviolent resistance, which combined truth, love, and the refusal to cause harm into a force that could overcome the most brutal violence and oppression.
The Indian Independence Movement inspired similar actions all over the world. .Some were directly inspired by his words and deeds, others came to embrace nonviolent resistance on a different path. All made the same commitment: to fight injustice without sacrificing their own humanity.
“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.” Mahatma Gandhi
