Did Martin Luther King learn nonviolence from Gandhi?

Partly. Gandhi was an important example for King, but King did not begin as a Gandhian, and several other people and traditions shaped how the movement understood nonviolence. Nonviolent resistance is the practice of seeking social change through methods such as symbolic protests, civil disobedience and noncooperation while refraining from violence and the threat of violence. It was a method that others in the movement had been studying for years before it became famous in Montgomery.

King's own start was different from the legend. He initially knew little about Gandhi and rarely used the word "nonviolence", and he even obtained guns to defend against possible attackers. Bayard Rustin, who became King's first regular adviser on nonviolence, later said that King's view of nonviolent tactics was "almost nonexistent" when the boycott began, with his home protected by guns. Rustin convinced him to give up the armed protection.

Rustin had studied the method for years. He helped found the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942, a pacifist organization based on Gandhi's writings, and in 1948 he travelled to India to learn from the leaders of the Gandhian movement. King was also advised by Harris Wofford and Glenn Smiley, and he drew on his Christian faith: the Golden Rule, loving your enemies, and the call to turn the other cheek in the Sermon on the Mount. Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience was another influence.

King did come to see Gandhi as proof that it worked. After a visit to India in 1959, he said that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. And in 1964, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, he hailed Gandhi's "successful precedent".