Martin Luther King: Nonviolence Movement.
was a nonviolent person and had a strong belief of not using violent. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. While growing up in the African-American Baptist church, as the son of a pastor, King was raised to exhibit nonviolence. Because the neighborhood he lived in and many of his neighbors were deeply religious, they too practiced being non-violent. Begin raised in the church, King developed a good heart with little to no expression of evil. Mohandas Gandhi was the most influential thinker in Dr. Martin Luther King's thought.
There were three influential thinkers in Dr. King's development of thought. The first was the influence of Reinhold Niebhor who wrote the book Moral Man in an Immoral Society. In this book it was argued that change would only come about through power struggle rather than using passive methods such as educating the white Americans. This was important because being Baptist he was taught that change only came from God; however, he soon came to the conclusion that people also have to participate in this struggle. While in college he was then introduced to Karl Marx who influenced strongly his ideas of class and capitalism. From this King became more than an activist he emerged forth as a political thinker. Lastly, the most influential thinker to his thought was Mohandas Gandhi and through philosophy of non-violence we began to see the creation of the strongest civil right leader.
As a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta, King was strongly introduced to the nonviolent way of life. King did much research about nonviolence, reading writings from great people. After reading Henry David Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience for the first time, he reread the essay several times. King continued to explore nonviolence while he began his studies at Crozer Theological Seminary, "but he was unable to see how nonviolence and love could work in mediating social conflict- (Carson).