I think you're right about that. In the USA, most folks seem to know basically one thing about Gandhi: He believed in nonviolence. If they know a second thing, it's a general concept that he freed India from British rule. I think of this aspect of his story in a similar light to that of MLK, whose success in fighting for Civil Rights and the well-being of people in general was achieved through an uneasy alliance with activists like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown who did not share his dedication to nonviolent resistance. My mother, a women's rights activist in the 1960s-80s, said when the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated in 1982:

"We should have burned down Watts."