Here is what I learned from the book, Ordinary Man, Extrordinary Mission: The Life and Work of E. Stanley Jones, by Stephen A. Graham (2005). I was totally unaware of this, and perhaps it will be news to you too. E. Stanley Jones was a missionary in India for many years. He had a strong friendship with Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. Everybody knows about Gandhi’s stands on non-violence and peaceful resistance, and how these were instrumental in the waning days of colonialism.
In 1948 Jones published a book about Gandhi. He is what Graham writes: “I would be remiss if I did not emphasize what an enormous debt the American civil rights movement owes to E. Stanley Jones. Almost entirely unknown today is the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. learned about Gandhi’s theory and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience from Jones. ” Jones writes in one of his later books, “When I saw Dr. Martin Luther King, he said, ‘It was your book on Gandhi that gave me my first inkling of nonviolent noncooperation. Here, I said to myself, is the way for the Negro to achieve his freedom. We will turn this whole movement from violence to nonviolence. We will match our capacity to suffer against his physical force; and we will wear our opponents down with goodwill.’ ” (p. 373).
In a footnote Graham goes on to add: “King’s acknowledging his reliance on Jones’s Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation is confirmed by an exhibit in the Martin Luther King Museum in Atlanta. An upstairs display shows King’s copy of Jones’s book, which is marked in King’s handwriting.” (p. 423).
It is only people who are uninformed who unilaterally lament the work of missionaries.
