Proponents of peace share their message

Arun Gandhi and Bernard Lafayette offered stories of adopting a doctrine of nonviolence.

By Christian Davenport

INQUIRER CORRESPONDENT
February 26, 1998

Their epiphanies came at different times and in different places but from the same source.

For Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, it came,shamefully, as he drove a car 18 miles home through the darkness behind his father, who would rather walk than ride with him.

For Bernard Lafayette, once a colleague of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and now president of American Baptist College, it came, humbly, on the street while a beaten supplicant repeated the Lord's Prayer through tears on his knees before him.

Both men related their conversions to nonviolence, a doctrine that inspired their mentors and changed the world, yesterday during a celebration of the lives of King andGandhi at Haverford College. About 150 people attended the talk, which was part ofthe "Season for Nonviolence," a 64-day national commemoration of the assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. King.

As a boy growing up in South Africa, Arun Gandhi was beaten by both whites andblacks because the color of his skin was different. Enraged, he began to strike back,often coming home dirtied and bruised. So his parents sent him to stay with hisgrandfather in India when he was 12.

For 18 months, Gandhi taught him to channel his anger, as if it were an energy source. He started keeping an "anger journal" and scribbled violent thoughts and deeds on his bedroom wall instead of acting on them.

But one of the most stunning lessons he learned came from his own father after Arunwent back to South Africa.His father, who had a meeting scheduled, asked Arun to give him a ride into town andhave the car serviced. After his father's meeting, Arun was to pick him up at precisely 5p.m.

But Arun lost track of time in a John Wayne double-feature and was an hour late. When his father asked him why, he lied and said the car was not yet ready.

But his father, who had called the mechanic, knew this to be false and told him so. Then, in his suit and dress shoes, his father said he needed to walk the 18 miles home to reflect on what a failure he was as a parent that his son had lied to him.

"I couldn't let him walk home alone in the dark on the dirt roads and through the sugarcane plantations," Arun said. "So I drove slowly behind him for 5 hours. . . .

"If I got conventional -- violent punishment -- I would have said, 'Oh, this time I got caught, next time I'll be more careful,' " he said. "But instead, on the car ride home I decided I would never lie again."

Lafayette did plenty of that while he was a member of a Philadelphia gang. And one day, while he was a teenager, he caught a member of the rival gang from Girard Avenue.

"I made him get on his knees," he recalled. "And then, because I didn't know what else to say, I told him to say the Lord's Prayer. And he cried because he didn't know it. SoI said, 'Repeat after me.' And in saying the prayer, it reformed me. It was a transforming experience. It brought me back to where I once was."

Later, in 1960, he was in Nashville, where he and scores of others were trying through sit-ins to force city restaurants to desegregate their lunch counters.

About 4 a.m. during one all-night rally, he got up to call his college dorm room. As hebegan to dial, he was confronted by 12 cab drivers angry that the sit-ins were causingthe diners to close, ridding them of a place to hang out between fares.

So they began to beat on him.

"Whenever they knocked me down, I would get right back up, and I would brush myself off because I had to do something with my hands," he recalled. "I would wipe their shoe prints off my face."

And while he was being kicked and punched, he was thinking about them. He was thinking about what he would be like if he were in their shoes, "and I began to have compassion for them," he said. "I would probably hate me too if I was brought up the way they were.

"So I stood there and I looked at them, and I was pushing forth every ounce of love and compassion that I had. And they stopped.

"There was this moment of truth, when they were looking at me and I at them, and I said: 'You gentlemen are through. I need to finish my phone call.' "

The mob of cab drivers then parted as he walked through them back to the phone booth, where he was promptly arrested for fighting.