Following his release from jail, he continued to protest the registration law by supporting labor strikes and organizing a massive non-violent march. Gandhi adopted the term 'civil disobedience' to describe his strategy of non-violently refusing to cooperate with injustice, but he preferred the Sanskrit word satyagraha (devotion to truth). While in jail, Gandhi read the essay ' Civil Disobedience' by Henry David Thoreau, a 19th-century American writer. He was arrested and put in jail, the first of many times he would be imprisoned for disobeying what he believed to be unjust laws. Gandhi, along with many other Indians, refused to obey this law. In 1907, the Boer legislature passed a law requiring that all Indians register with the police and be fingerprinted. Gandhi sympathized with the Boers, but sided with Britain because he then believed that the British Empire ' existed for the benefit of the world.' Britain won the war, but much of the governing of South Africa remained in the hands of the Boers. This so angered the Boer population that at one point a white mob almost lynched him.Īt the turn of the century, the British fought the Boers over control of South Africa with its rich gold and diamond mines. Gandhi soon became an outspoken critic of South Africa's discrimination policies.

Gandhi refused the order and police forced him off the train. Gandhi himself experienced this discrimination when railroad officials ordered him to sit in a third-class coach at the back of a train even though he had purchased a first-class ticket. Traveling to South Africa in 1893, Gandhi soon discovered that the ruling white Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers, discriminated against the dark-skinned Indians who had been imported as laborers. When he returned to India three years later, he took a job representing an Indian ship-trading company that was involved in a complicated lawsuit in South Africa. In 1888, Gandhi sailed for England where, following the advice of his father, he studied to become a lawyer. 'Religions are different roads converging upon the same point,' he once said. She impressed on him beliefs in non-violence, vegetarianism, fasting for purification, and respect for all religions. Instead, he was heavily influenced by the Hinduism and Jainism of his devoutly religious mother.

Growing up, Gandhi exhibited none of his father's interest in or skill at politics. His father was the chief minister of an Indian province and showed great skill in maneuvering between British and Indian leaders.

Gandhi was born into a Hindu merchant caste family in 1869.

Gandhiji full name