Appearance
3.6 — The Reformers and the Voices
Nobody on this page commanded an army. Each of them changed a country anyway, and most of them were considered dangerous, ridiculous or both while they were doing it.
India
What was Gandhi's actual method?
Not passivity, which is what "non-violence" is usually heard as. His method was deliberate, public, mass lawbreaking, chosen so that the state must either back down or reveal itself as violent in front of an audience.
He called it satyagraha, "holding firmly to truth", and he developed it not in India but in South Africa, where he spent twenty-one years and was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for sitting in a first-class carriage he had a ticket for.
The design has four parts. Pick a law whose injustice can be stated in one sentence — the salt tax, in 2.5. Break it openly and announce that you will, rather than evading it. Accept the punishment without resisting, which removes the state's justification for force. And make sure it is seen, which is why he cultivated journalists and why the march took 24 days rather than a train journey.
He was not a saint and did not claim to be. His treatment of his wife and sons was harsh, his early writing about Black South Africans was contemptuous in ways he later moved away from, and his experiments in celibacy involved young women in his household in ways that were criticised at the time and are worse now. Ambedkar's disagreement with him over caste was fundamental and is covered next. He was assassinated on 30 January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who considered him too conciliatory towards Muslims.
Who was Ambedkar, and why does the argument with Gandhi matter?
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) was born into the Mahar community, then treated as untouchable. At school he was made to sit on a sack outside the classroom and was not allowed to touch the water tap; a peon poured water from a height so it would not be polluted by his hands, and on days the peon was absent he went without.
He became one of the most educated Indians of his generation — doctorates from Columbia and the LSE, a barrister from Gray's Inn — and used it entirely on one problem.
He chaired the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution, which abolished untouchability outright in Article 17, guaranteed equality before the law, and established reservations in education, employment and legislatures for Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
His disagreement with Gandhi was not tactical, it was foundational. Gandhi wanted caste reform from within Hinduism, treating untouchability as a corruption of a system that was otherwise sound, and opposed separate electorates for Depressed Classes on the grounds that they would split Hindu society. Ambedkar's position was that the system itself produces the abuse and cannot be reformed by appealing to the goodwill of those it benefits. In 1932 Gandhi fasted against separate electorates until Ambedkar conceded, in the Poona Pact — a concession Ambedkar described afterwards as made under duress.
His book Annihilation of Caste was written as a speech he was then not permitted to deliver, so he published it himself. In 1956, months before his death, he converted to Buddhism with several hundred thousand followers in a single ceremony at Nagpur.
Who was Savitribai Phule?
India's first woman teacher in the modern sense, and probably the first to run a school for girls.
Savitribai Phule (1831–1897) was married at nine to Jyotirao Phule, who taught her to read at home because no school would take her. In 1848 the two of them opened a school for girls in Pune. Within a few years they were running several, including for children of the lowest castes.
She was pelted with stones, mud and cow dung on the walk to school, and carried a spare sari to change into on arrival. Her family and her husband's were pressured to throw them out, and did.
The couple also opened a well in their own compound to anyone regardless of caste, and ran a shelter for pregnant widows — who at the time faced abandonment or worse — and adopted a child born there. She died of plague in 1897, having caught it while carrying an infected child to a clinic on her back.
What did Raja Ram Mohan Roy change?
Roy (1772–1833) campaigned against sati, the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, and it was banned in Bengal in 1829 largely on the strength of his argument.
The method is why he is here. He did not argue on humanitarian grounds alone, which the orthodox could dismiss as foreign. He argued from the Sanskrit scriptures themselves, showing that the practice had no basis in the older texts and had been read into later ones — which meant the defenders had to fight him on their own ground and lose.
He also founded the Brahmo Samaj, campaigned for women's property rights and against child marriage and polygamy, published newspapers in Bengali, Persian and English, and — against the prevailing view among reformers — argued that Indians should be taught modern science and English rather than only classical learning, because that is where the useful knowledge was.
Elsewhere
What did Mandela do that made the transition work?
Twenty-seven years in prison, and then the decision not to take revenge for them.
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) was jailed in 1962, spent eighteen years on Robben Island breaking limestone in a quarry — the glare permanently damaged his eyes — and was released in 1990. South Africa in 1990 was widely expected to end in a civil war.
The thing he did that is genuinely hard is that he negotiated with the people who had imprisoned him, kept negotiating through massacres and assassinations designed to wreck the talks, and insisted publicly and repeatedly that the enemy was the system rather than white South Africans.
He served one term as president and stepped down, which in the context of post-independence Africa at the time was itself a statement. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered amnesty in exchange for full public confession, on the argument that a country cannot prosecute its way out of forty years of state crime and cannot heal without hearing what happened. It is genuinely contested whether it delivered justice, and many victims' families say it did not. It did prevent the war.
He was on the United States terrorism watch list until 2008.
What is the part of Martin Luther King that gets left out?
The economics, and how unpopular he was.
The version taught in schools ends with the 1963 speech and the Civil Rights Act. What followed is the part that gets dropped. King moved to campaigning against poverty across racial lines, against the Vietnam War — which cost him allies in the government and the press — and was in Memphis in April 1968 supporting a strike by sanitation workers over pay and safety when he was shot.
His approval ratings in the United States were poor for most of his career. A Gallup poll in 1966 found around two thirds of Americans viewed him unfavourably. His last book was titled Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? and the FBI ran a sustained campaign against him including an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself.
He read Gandhi carefully and travelled to India in 1959. The transmission is direct and documented: the method developed in South Africa and India, refined against the British, applied in Montgomery and Birmingham.
Who was Rosa Parks, actually?
Not a tired seamstress who spontaneously refused to move. She was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had attended a training school for organisers, and had been working on civil rights for over a decade.
The framing matters because it changes the lesson. The tired-woman story makes it a moment of individual feeling. The accurate story makes it a planned action by an experienced organiser, chosen at a time the movement was ready to act on it — the local organisation had been waiting for a case with a defendant whose character could not be attacked, and had passed over an earlier arrest, of the pregnant unmarried teenager Claudette Colvin, for that reason.
Parks lost her job, received death threats for years, and moved to Detroit. The bus boycott that followed ran for 381 days.
Who is Malala Yousafzai, and what is often missed about her?
She was shot in the head on a school bus in Pakistan's Swat valley in 2012, at fifteen, by a Taliban gunman who asked for her by name, for campaigning for girls' education.
She had already been campaigning for four years by then, writing an anonymous blog for the BBC's Urdu service at eleven about life under Taliban rule, and appearing in a documentary. Her father ran a girls' school and refused to close it. The shooting is what made her internationally known, and the work preceded it.
She survived, finished school in Britain, took a degree at Oxford, and became the youngest Nobel laureate at seventeen — sharing the 2014 Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian campaigner who has physically raided factories and quarries to free bonded child labourers, an award deliberately given jointly to an Indian and a Pakistani.
Voices
Why does Frederick Douglass matter as a writer, not only as an activist?
Because his existence was the argument.
Douglass (c. 1818–1895) escaped slavery in Maryland at about twenty, having taught himself to read partly by trading bread to white children for lessons after his owner's wife was forbidden to continue teaching him — she had begun, and her husband stopped her on the grounds that literacy would make a slave unmanageable. Douglass wrote later that this was the moment he understood what reading was for.
The defence of slavery rested on a claim about capacity. A formerly enslaved man who wrote clear, ferocious, tightly argued prose, published his own newspaper, and spoke to enormous audiences refuted it by standing there. Audiences accused him of never having been enslaved because he spoke too well, so he published a narrative with names and places in it — which exposed him to recapture, and he left for Britain for two years while supporters bought his legal freedom.
His 1852 speech asking what the Fourth of July means to a slave is one of the hardest things in American oratory, and he delivered it to an audience that had invited him to celebrate.
What did Simone de Beauvoir actually argue?
The Second Sex (1949) is nine hundred pages and one sentence of it is quoted everywhere: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
The argument is a distinction between biology and everything built on top of it. Being female is a fact about a body. Being a woman, in the sense that carries expectations about behaviour, ambition, dress, work and worth, is a social construction that has been presented as though it were the fact about the body. She traced how the construction is built — through myth, literature, law, education and the household — and argued that it consistently positions woman as the Other, defined against a male default rather than in her own terms.
The book was placed on the Vatican's list of prohibited books. It is the direct ancestor of most twentieth-century feminist theory, including the later distinction between sex and gender.
Who was Ida B. Wells?
An investigative journalist who did to lynching what John Snow did to cholera: she counted it.
Wells (1862–1931) was born into slavery in Mississippi and became a newspaper owner in Memphis. After three friends of hers who ran a successful grocery were lynched in 1892, she investigated. The standard justification for lynching at the time was that it punished the rape of white women. Wells collected and published the records — hundreds of cases with names, dates and circumstances — and showed that the accusation was absent in the large majority of them, and that the actual pattern correlated with Black economic success and with consensual relationships being reframed after the fact.
Her printing press was destroyed and she was warned she would be killed if she returned to Memphis. She continued from Chicago and Britain, published statistical pamphlets, co-founded the NAACP, and campaigned for women's suffrage — including refusing to walk at the back of a 1913 suffrage parade in Washington where Black women had been segregated, and joining the Illinois delegation in the middle of the march instead.
She received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize citation in 2020.
What comes next
The last page of this Part is about the ones who were nearly left out entirely — the people whose work is in every textbook and whose names had to be put back into it afterwards.