What is the role of mohandas K Gandhi in civil rights movement
Answers
1. He organised non-violent protests against the racial discrimination directed towards the native Africans and Indians in 1894.
2. He came to India for a short time in 1896 to gather fellow Indian to serve in South Africa. He gathered 800 Indians but they were welcomed by an irate mob and Gandhi was injured in the attack.
3. He organised the Indian Ambulance Corps for the British during the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. So that British could understand humanity but the ethnic discrimination and torture continued on Indians.
4. He set up Phoenix Farm near Durban where Gandhi trained his cadre for peaceful restraint or non-violent Satyagraha. This farm considered as the birthplace of Satyagraha.
5. He also set up another farm which was called Tolstoy Farm which is considered as the place where Satyagraha was moulded into a weapon of protest.
6. The first non-violent Satyagraha campaign of Mahatma Gandhi was organised in September 1906 to protest against the Transvaal Asiatic ordinance which was constituted against the local Indians. After that, he also held Satyagraha against the Black Act in June 1907.
7. He was sentenced to jail for organising the non-violent movement in 1908 but after meeting with General Smuts who was a British Commonwealth statesman, was released.
8. He was sentenced to a three month jail in Volkshurst and Pretoria in 1909. After release, he went to London to seek the assistance of the Indian community there but his effort was in vain.
9. In 1913, he fought against the override of non-Christian marriages.
10. He organised another Satyagraha movement in Transvaal against the oppression that Indian minors were suffering from. He led around 2,000 Indians across the Transvaal border.