Chapter 7 - Socialism, Nonviolence, and Civil Rights : The American Journeys of Rammanohar Lohia

Summary

Abstract On May 28, 1964, Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, a prominent Socialist member of the Indian parliament, was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, for attempting to enter a “whites only” restaurant. Lohia was not new to the United States, nor to being arrested while fighting injustice. In the summer of 1951, he spent over a month traveling across the United States, encouraging a range of audiences to take up civil disobedience in the struggle against American racism. He met with dozens of activists, intellectuals, and political figures, including Walter Reuther, Pearl S. Buck, Norman Thomas, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Albert Einstein. By examining Lohia's American journeys, this paper will explore the larger intersection of socialism and civil rights within and between the United States and India.

Keywords: Socialism, civil rights, African American, Cold War, Non-alignment, diplomacy

On May 28, 1964, Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, a prominent socialist member of the Indian parliament, was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi. His “crime” was attempting to enter a “whites only” restaurant. After the U.S. State Department sent an apology to the Indian Ambassador, Lohia informed reporters that both the State Department and the Indian Embassy “may go to hell.” American leaders should apologize “to the Statue of Liberty and to three billion citizens of the world.” Lohia's math is revealing. Those “three billion citizens,” far more than the population of India, represented all “dark” or “colored” people—terms of racial solidarity pioneered by the African American intellectual and antiracist activist, W.E.B. Du Bois. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Du Bois had articulated a transnational and transracial conception of “colored solidarity.” Lohia embraced such an expansive antiracist politics. When he explained that he courted arrest in Mississippi in order to show his support for the “revolution against color inequality,” Lohia meant not just the American civil rights movement, but related struggles against racism and imperialism throughout the world.

Lohia's transnational understanding of American racism mirrored the global lens with which he viewed Indian politics. Born in Fazibad District in the United Provinces in 1910, Lohia studied in Bombay, Benares, and Calcutta before traveling to Europe to advance his education. After completing his Ph.D. in Berlin, he returned to India in 1933, eager to contribute to the anticolonial struggle. He was soon arrested.