Martin Luther King, Jr., and Militant Nonviolence: A Psychoanalytic Study

Abstract

It is an impediment to conducting a psychoanalytic inquiry into the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., that his heroic attributes are many and large. He was a charismatic leader of the black church; a tactician who forged an American version of Gandhi’s nonviolent movement in India; a preacher and orator who electrified the black and white liberal community in overcoming racism; a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his struggle against the injustice of separatism and racial inequality; and a martyr who fell to an assassin’s bullet and thereby became enshrined as a symbol of America’s unsteady progress in perfecting a union dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Yet above all, he was a human being, who recognized his own imperfection and who struggled with a sense of sin that was both personal and communal.