Cast Down Your Bucket on the Mountaintop

Abstract Both scholarship and popular understanding conceptualize Booker T. Washington’s acquiescence to Jim Crow as the foil of the African American struggle for civil rights. However, this article argues that Bookerism was in fact integral to the civil rights movement because it facilitated the incorporation of the caste ideologies of Mohandas K. Gandhi and American academic sociology into the thought of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi and sociology utilized Bookerism to idealize caste hierarchy. Although Thurman and King identified with the plight of Dalits in India, their nonviolent desegregationist religious thought reworked sociological and Gandhian notions of caste.