<<Why not stay there?
<<Did you totally ignore Gandi and Dr Martin Luther King Jr?>>
More or less, I did. Gandhi was the spearhead or the focus of the Indian independence movement, but it didn't start or end with him. What finished the Raj was the toll of the Second World War on Great Britain. They were finished, spent, as an imperialist power. Not only India, but all of their African colonies soon freed themselves from the bondage of colonialism. It was a burden that the British could no longer afford to bear. They just couldn't afford it.
Dr. King basically followed around a booming post-war drive for black equality. He didn't initiate the sit-ins or the boycotts, he followed them and gave them voice. Basically it was the student radicals who organized these protests from the grassroots up, and not Dr. King, who created the images of firehoses and police dogs, of white racist mobs cracking skulls and spewing hate. As long as the TV networks continued to cover the news, America was getting a black eye in the eyes of the world every day this kind of shit continued. Finally the U.S. Congress got the message, they realized that white racism was a luxury they could no longer afford if they were trying to convince the rest of the world that their way was better than the Communist way. It was not Dr. King that they were giving in to, it was the images on TV that the student radicals had created.