Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King in 1964. Mrs. King
was a vegan for the last ten years of her life.
In 1843, Bronson Alcott, father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, moved his family to a country farm and set out to build a utopian community. Alcott was an avid anti-slavery abolitionist and a vegan. The family wore only linen because cotton was the product of human slavery and wool was stolen from sheep.
The experiment was a dismal failure, later parodied in Louisa’s novelette Transcendental Wild Oats. But Bronson Alcott is remembered by many as one who recognized the wide scope of injustice in his world. It made no sense to him to campaign against human slavery while consuming the meat or milk of enslaved animals.
Alcott was just one of the scores of people who have spoken out in big and small ways against injustice over the centuries. And today we honor a man whose voice for justice was the most courageous and insightful of the 20th century.
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.”
On the King Center website, Coretta Scott King wrote that, while we remember Dr. King himself today, it is also a day that commemorates “the timeless values he taught us through his example—the values of courage, truth, justice, compassion, dignity, humility and service…”
A commitment to veganism honors the principles that were at the core of Dr. King’s work.
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Comments
What an insightful article! Thanks so much for sharing that information.
i think it was the last 15 years from about 1991 to 2006.
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