When Martin Luther King Jr. visited the villa in Mumbai, India, where Mohandas Gandhi stayed in the 1920s, he had a special request: He wanted to spend the night in Gandhi's bedroom.
It was 1959, 11 years after Gandhi's death. The house, called Mani Bhavan, where the Indian leader taught followers to spin their own fabric and where he launched satyagraha — his movement for truth and nonviolent resistance — had been converted into a museum. In an austere top-floor room where Gandhi's mattress and shoes still lay, King said he could feel "vibrations" of the Mahatma, or great soul.
"[King] was booked in a very good hotel. But he said, 'I am not going anywhere else. I am going to stay here, because I am getting vibrations of Gandhi,' " recalls curator Usha Thakkar.
So curators hauled in two cots, and the American civil rights leader and his wife, Coretta Scott King, spent the night next to Gandhi's vacant mattress. Afterward, Martin Luther King told All India Radio that he'd decided to adopt Gandhi's method of civil disobedience as his own.
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Gandhi was a racist
Last year, a Gandhi statue was removed from a university campus in Ghana. Activists there and in Malawi are using the hashtag #GandhiMustFall. They're angry about his early writings.
In 1903, when Gandhi was in South Africa, he wrote that white people there should be "the predominating race." He also said black people "are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."
There's no way around it: Gandhi was a racist early in his life, says his biographer Ramachandra Guha.
"Gandhi as a young man went with the ideas of his culture and his time. He thought in his 20s that Europeans are the most civilized. Indians were almost as civilized, and Africans were uncivilized," Guha, 61, told NPR in an interview in May at his home in Bengaluru, India.
"However, he outgrew his racism quite decisively, and for most of his life as a public figure, he was an anti-racist, talking for an end to discrimination of all kinds," he said.
That included gender discrimination. Gandhi championed women in politics. But he was also obsessed with his own celibacy. In his late 70s, before he died at 78, he slept naked with his grandniece when she was in her late teens. He said he wanted to test his willpower to abstain from sex.
Nowadays, most people would call that abuse. Some question whether the young female was capable of giving consent as a minor to a man who was so revered and so much more powerful than she.
And when they learn that MLK was actually an abusive husband who would roll into town and literally ask "where the white women at?" looking for prostitutes, whom he would also abuse, they're going to freak out at having to take down that MLK statue on the Mall.
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