Martin Luther King, Jr.

My favorite kind of book is one that makes you want to read twenty or thirty others because of the titles and writers referred to by the author. You think you're reading a single book, but by the time you close it, you've been introduced to a whole community.John Ansbro's book on Dr. King's philosophy of nonviolence is like that. First published twenty years ago and thankfully re-released, the book helps us understand King's nonviolence through careful and interesting discussions of the influences on him. Ansbro traces King's personalism and focus on agape ethics through thinkers such as Howard Thurman, Kant, Nygren, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Niebuhr, DuBois Gandhi, and Thoreau. Especially useful is his discussion of King's views on collective evil and what he sees as its alternative, the "beloved community." Equally useful and fascinating is Ansbro's comparison of Dr. King's nonviolence to Franz Fanon's and Malcolm X's (early) espousal of violence.Reading this book is an education not only in Dr. King's philosophy and stragegy of nonviolent resistance, but also on nonviolence as taught and practiced through the ages. In this day and age, when we seem even more ready than in days past to resort to violence as a way of settling differences, the re-issue of Ansbro's book is a Godsend.