"In January of 1957 Martin Luther King Jr. was awaiting the imminent publication of an essay he had contributed to Christian Century, a weekly magazine. The "pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., had spent the previous year helping to lead a boycott of the city’s buses to force an end to racially segregated seating. As he told the editor of the magazine, successful completion of the boycott had given King 'a little time off to do some much needed writing.'

“'The basic question which confronts the world’s oppressed is: How is the struggle against the forces of injustice to be waged? There are two possible answers,' the young minister wrote. 'One is resort to the all too prevalent method of physical violence and corroding hatred. The danger of this method is its futility. Violence solves no social problems; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.'

"King offered an alternative he called 'nonviolent resistance,' and the rest of the essay laid the framework he would use in subsequent books and speeches to explain the deceptively complex idea. As practiced by Mohandas Gandhi in pursuit of India’s independence, nonviolence 'is not a method for cowards; it does resist,' King wrote. 'The nonviolent resister is just as strongly opposed to the evil against which he protests as is the person who uses violence.'"

Article: After the Capitol Riot, Remembering the Power of Nonviolence