"In the winter of 1959 Martin Luther King went to India. It was for him a pilgrimage, as Gandhi’s non-violent campaign to free India from British rule had inspired him. But when he visited a school in the southern state of Kerala he was “a bit shocked and peeved” that the principal of a school introduced him as “a fellow untouchable from the United States of America”, untouchables being the caste the Hindus had for centuries oppressed so cruelly. Then, thinking about life in America, he accepted that, “yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable”.
