Would Martin Luther King, Jr. Have Gone Vegan?
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From a blog called “On Nonhuman Slavery”:
We can’t help but wonder: Would the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. have become a vegan at some point in his life? It’s certainly conceivable that he would have. His son Dexter Scott King, who is president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-violent Social Change, has been vegan for more than 20 years. He once said that vegetarianism is the logical extension of his father’s philosophy regarding non-violence. Coretta Scott King, a tireless activist for social justice, was also a vegan for more than ten years before her death in 2006.
If his wife and son saw the link between animal foods and violence, it’s not hard to imagine that Dr. King would have perceived this connection as well. Writing from the Birmingham jail in 1963, he said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
You can read the whole article here >>
One of his sons has, so of course his spirit guided his son to become one~~~
Thank you for sharing this. Just to clarify, the article comes from The Examiner…
http://www.examiner.com/vegan-in-national/a-vegan-lifestyle-honors-martin-luther-king-jr
This is a bit more peripheral to MLK than the man’s immediate family, but it’s worth mentioning that some other notables of the historical civil disobedience movement have been vegetarians: Thoreau (albeit pretty inconsistent about it), Leo Tolstoy, and Mohandas Gandhi, for three.
Although King might have been a bit different; historically, vegetarianism has had associations with poverty, simplicity, and asceticim, not just nonviolence or animal rights. Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi were all to some degree advocates of simplicity and voluntary poverty. King was more interested in combating involuntary poverty than promoting the voluntary kind.
Then again, though, the path of King’s family (Coretta Scott King, etc) suggests that perhaps he wasn’t so different after all.