Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) is mostly known for his role in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement; a movement for which he lived, fought, and died. However, the impact of MLK’s message and mission extended – and continues to extend – far beyond these American shores.
“[Dr. King] applied an ethical framework of compassion and nonviolence to his theories and action in the international community,” said Marcus King, director of George Washington University’s Elliott School’s international affairs master’s program.
EXPOSURE TO GLOBAL ISSUES
King was the moderator of a 2019 forum on MLK where Dr. Robert M. Franklin, a former president of Morehouse, former head of Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, and professor of theology and social justice at both institutions, spoke.
Franklin shared that MLK was exposed to international happenings in part by “an extensive roster of speakers who visited Morehouse’s chapel, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Howard University’s first African American president Mordecai Wyatt Johnson,” wrote Tatyana Hopkins for GW Today
Moreover, the mentorship of Dr. Benjamin Mays and Dr. Howard Thurman, influenced a young MLK to see himself as a citizen of the world.
Decades before MLK encountered Mahatma Gandhi, Thurman experienced his own life-changing meeting with the international figure, further strengthening his words to MLK about the importance of seeing issues from a global perspective.
INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL
MLK’s first taste of international travel took place in 1957, just months after the Dec. 1956 end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
According to Franklin, MLK’s visit to Ghana, Liberia and Senegal happened amid an emerging number of countries in Africa and Asia freeing themselves from the shackles of colonization and becoming newly freed nations.
For MLK, this fostered an intellectual, spiritual and moral kinship between global movements of oppressed people and nations fighting for freedom and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
“[Dr. King] recognized the strong parallel between resistance to European colonialism in Africa and the struggle against racism in the United States,” Dr. Franklin said.
MLK’s Africa connection alone is way more extensive than he’s usually given credit for. But he didn’t end his global tour in the motherland.
Additionally, MLK visited Europe and South America before going on a month-long trip to India in 1959.
“Gandhi was long gone, as he had been assassinated in 1948, but many in the world were beginning to regard young King as the new and emerging symbol of international nonviolence, persistence and social change,” added Franklin.
Few know of MLK’s international travels and his influence and inspiration that was and is felt well beyond his home country.
GLOBAL IMPACT
Streets and boulevards named after King can be found all over the world, from Niger to Australia, Brazil to Germany. There is a park named for him in Paris, a church in Debrecen, Hungary, a school in Yaounde, Cameroon, and even a bridge in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
This global reach is due in part to the media’s coverage of the work MLK did in the U.S. But its also because MLK consciously connected the U.S. struggle for domestic equality for Black people with international concerns. MLK is legend in South Africa, as he was an outspoken critic of South Africa’s apartheid regime. MLK was also a harsh critic of European colonialism in Africa, South America and Asia. MLK also supported land reforms for those living in poverty in Latin America, and saw poverty as an international human rights issue.
It can be argued that MLK and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement inspired the 1965 adoption of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the first international human rights treaty since the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
MLK’s international reach extended via the many global leaders he inspired, with South Africa’s Nelson Mandela being just one of them. But just as important, yet even more rarely discussed is the impact Africa had on MLK.
