William Stuart Nelson
“My final conversation with Mr. Gandhi was in Calcutta in August of 1947 when riots raged between Hindus and Muslims… I raised a question of the efficacy of the nonviolent technique in group relations. He declared that on that subject he was at the moment in darkness. He had spent almost a lifetime teaching that nonviolence was a weapon not of the weak but of the strong, of those who are able to strike back but will not. He realized then that his people did not understand. This is one of the most difficult aspects of nonviolence to fathom and accept and the explanation for the failure of so many efforts in its name. Nonviolence is not an expedient to be used when no other instrument is available and one is otherwise powerless. It is not a tactic, a strategy. It is a way of life, a religion. It begins in personal relations, in attitudes toward [all]—the strong and the weak, it expresses itself in thought, in speech, as well as in action.”
-William Stuart Nelson, on Mahatma Gandhi, 1947
An internationally known expert on nonviolence, William Stuart Nelson corresponded regularly with Martin Luther King. When Nelson sent him his 1958 article “Satyagraha: Gandhian Principles of Non-Violent Non-Cooperation,” King wrote that it was “one of the best and most balanced analyses of the Gandhian principles of nonviolent, noncooperation that I have read” (King, 18 August 1958).
Nelson was born in Paris, Kentucky, in 1895. He served in World War I and went on to receive his BA from Howard University in 1920. After attending schools in France and Germany, he received a BD from Yale (1924) and returned to Howard to teach. In 1931 he became the first black president of Shaw University and, later, the first president of Dillard University. He finished his career at Howard, serving as dean of the School of Religion from 1940 to 1948, dean of the university from 1948 to 1961, and vice president of special projects from 1961 to 1967.
Nelson made several trips to India. In 1946, while visiting as a representative of the American Friends Service Committee, he marched with Gandhi through Bengal in an effort to help reconcile the Hindu and Muslim communities. He returned to India in 1958 as a Fulbright scholar, but could not stay long enough to accompany King on his trip there in 1959. After King returned home, Nelson wrote that what he had “done in America is proving a source of great encouragement to and re-awakening of people in India, and is thereby serving the cause of non-violence in the very country which has witnessed its most significant demonstration” (Nelson, 10 April 1959).
Nelson was active throughout the civil rights movement, speaking at the 1959 Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change and the 1962 convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and joining the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. He remained a member of various peace, religious, and educational groups until his death in 1977.