What did Gandhi and MLK have in common?

Both used nonviolent civil disobedience as the primary tool of political change. Both led mass movements against entrenched systems of racial and colonial oppression. Both were willing to be imprisoned as part of their strategy — using their own suffering as political testimony. Both were assassinated.

MLK explicitly acknowledged Gandhi's influence. He visited India in 1959 to study the Gandhi movement and returned convinced that satyagraha principles applied to the American civil rights struggle.

How were their contexts different?

Gandhi operated against colonial rule — an external power with accountability to international opinion. He was fighting for national independence. MLK was fighting for equal rights within a democracy — a different and in some ways harder problem, because it required changing the minds and laws of a society the movement was already part of.

How were their methods different?

Gandhi favored long, sustained campaigns (the Salt March was 24 days; the independence movement was decades). MLK worked in shorter, targeted campaigns designed for maximum media exposure: Birmingham, Selma, Washington. MLK was more attentive to television as a political tool; Gandhi operated primarily through print journalism and personal presence.

What did MLK add to Gandhi's philosophy?

The explicitly Christian theological framework — love (agape) as the motivation for nonviolent resistance, not just strategy. MLK's sermons gave nonviolent resistance an emotional and spiritual vocabulary that reached people who might not have responded to Gandhi's more abstract truth-force language.

Who had more immediate impact?

Both succeeded in their immediate goals — Indian independence (1947), Civil Rights Act (1964). Gandhi's movement took longer; MLK's was more compressed. Both left movements that continued after their deaths with more mixed results than either would have wanted.