In an Inescapable Network of Mutuality: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Globalization of an Ethical Ideal

By Dr. Vicki L. Crawford

The scholarship on Martin Luther King Jr. has too often cast him in the image of the Southern black preacher and the American Gandhi, while ignoring or trivializing his global connections and significance. This groundbreaking work, written by scholars, religious leaders, and activists of different backgrounds, addresses this glaring pattern of neglect in King studies. King is treated here as both a global figure and a forerunner of much of what is currently associated with contemporary globalization theory and praxis. The contributors to this volume agree that King must be understood not only as a thinker, visionary, and social change agent in his own historical context, but also in terms of his meaning for the different generations who still appeal to him as an authority, inspiration, and model of exemplary service to humanity. The task of engaging King both in context and beyond context is fulfilled in remarkable ways in this volume, without doing essential violence to this phenomenal figure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781621898252

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Contributors

Lewis V. Baldwin is Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He has written scores of articles and several books on various aspects of African American religion and culture, and has lectured and taught courses on Martin Luther King, Jr. for some thirty years. He has received numerous honors and awards for his scholarship on King and the civil rights movement. Among his publications are There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1991); To Make the Wounded Whole: The Cultural Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1992); Toward the Beloved Community: Martin Luther King, Jr. and South Africa (1995); The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010); and Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010).

Peter Cousins holds degrees from Merton College, Oxford University, and the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University in the United Kingdom. He has served as an international accompanier-human rights observer with the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation in San José de Apartadó and Bogotá, Colombia. He has also worked in support of asylum seekers and the homeless across Great Britain, and currently practices as a community mediator in the south of England.

Vicki L. Crawford is Director of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection and a scholar of the civil rights movement, focusing on the role of women. She is the editor of the groundbreaking volume of essays, Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers (1990), which was one of the first publications to address the underrepresented role of women in the African American freedom struggle. Her book chapters and essays have appeared in The American Woman 2000; Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1994); Sisters in the Struggle: Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (2001); and The Journal of African American History.

Crystal A. DeGregory teaches History at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her research explores the interrelationship between black struggles for freedom, justice, and equality, with a special focus on the activist qualities of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU). Her work has appeared in several publications, among which are The Tennessee State University Journal; Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture; Tennessee Historical Quarterly; African American National Biography; and Freedom Facts and Firsts: 400 Years of the African American Civil Rights Experience (2009), edited by Linda T. Wynn and Jessie Carney Smith.

Paul R. Dekar is Professor Emeritus of Evangelism and Mission, Memphis Theological Seminary, Memphis, Tennessee. He has received numerous grants and awards, and has lectured in parts of the United States, Canada, and Australia. Among his publications are Crossing Barriers in World Mission (1983); For the Healing of Nations (1993); Creating the Beloved Community: A History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (2005); Community of the Transfiguration: Journey of a New Monastic Community (2008); Building a Culture of Peace: Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America (2009); and Thomas Merton: Twentieth-Century Wisdom for Twenty-First Century Living (2011).

Noel Leo Erskine is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Candler School of Theology and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has authored and edited some eleven books, among which are King Among the Theologians (1994); From Garvey to Marley: Rastafari Theology (2005); and Black Theology and Pedagogy (2008).

Everett Gendler is an ordained Conservative Rabbi with an extensive history of involvement in progressive causes, such as Jewish nonviolence, the egalitarian Jewish Havurah movement, and Jewish environmentalism. In the 1950s and 1960s he served as rabbi to a number of congregations in Mexico (1957–59), Brazil (1961), and Cuba (1968–69), and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. on various occasions between August 1962 and March 1968. Since 1995, the year of his retirement, he has been involved with a Nonviolence Training Project for the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India. His articles and ideas have appeared in Tikkun and in such volumes as Protest: Pacifism and Politics (1968); A Conflict of Loyalties: The Case of Selective Conscientious Objection (1968); The Challenge of Shalom: The Jewish Tradition of Peace and Justice (1994); The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment, and the Good Life (1997); Torah of the Earth (2000); and Jewish Mysticism and the Spiritual Life: Classical Texts, Contemporary Reflections (2010).

Mary Gendler is a retired clinical psychologist. She and her husband, Rabbi Everett Gendler, were involved with Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights activities in the American South in the 1960s. During the 1960s and 1970s, she and Rabbi Gendler participated in several alternative residential communities, including Ivan Illich’s Centro Intercultural de Documentación in Cuernavaca, Mexico (1968–69), and the interracial and interreligious living center Packard Manse in Stoughton, Massachusetts (1969–71). She worked as a clinical psychologist from 1973 to 1995. Since 1995, she, along with her husband, has been involved in community education work among Tibetan exiles on Strategic Nonviolent Struggle in Dharamsala, India.

Mary Elizabeth King is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Peace, an affiliate of the United Nations, and a Scholar-in-Residence with the American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. She is also Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford in Britain. Her Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (1987), which highlights her experiences working for four years with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and at times with Martin Luther King, Jr., won a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. She has received numerous other honors and awards, including a James M. Lawson Award for Nonviolent Achievement, the 2003 Jamnalal Bajaj International Award in Mumbai, India, and the 2009 El-Hibri Peace Education Prize. Her books include Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Power of Nonviolent Action (2002; originally 1999); A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (2007); and The New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe (2009).

Roy Money is a biostatistician in the Psychiatry Department at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He was a founding member of the Southern Student Organizing Committee in 1964 and has remained involved in social justice struggles. He has written numerous book reviews for Turning Wheel, the journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and some of his research focuses on areas of congruence between Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea of the beloved community and the central Buddhist concept of dependent origination, interdependent arising, or interbeing.

Thomas A. Mulhall is an independent researcher trained in International Peace Studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin. He has done extensive research on the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., and is the author of a number of forthcoming articles on the subject. He is currently completing the first book on King and the World Council of Churches (WCC).

Francisco Rodés teaches Latin American Church History at the Ecumenical Seminary in Matanzas, Cuba, and is also pastor emeritus of the First Baptist Church in that city, where he served for thirty-seven years. He is director of the Kairos Community Center, a ministry of First Baptist in Matanzas. His other involvements include first president of the Fraternity of Cuban Baptist Churches, national coordinator of the Evangelical Prison Chaplaincy of Cuba, membership in the Baptist World Alliance Peace Commission, and founder of the Coordination of Baptist Students and Workers of Cuba, a kind of Baptist Peace Fellowship.

John J. Thatamanil is an Associate Professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary in New York, New York. He has taught widely in the areas of comparative theology, theologies of religious pluralism, Hindu-Christian dialogue, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and Eastern Orthodox theology and spirituality, and is the author of The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament—An East-West Conversation (2006). His forthcoming book is tentatively titled, Religious Diversity after Religion: Rethinking Theologies of Religious Pluralism.

Linda T. Wynn teaches in the Department of History and Political Science at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and is also the Assistant Director for State Programs with the Tennessee Historical Commission. In addition to coediting Profiles of African Americans in Tennessee (1996) with Bobby L. Lovett, and Freedom Facts and Firsts: 400 Years of the African American Civil Rights Experience (2009) with Jessie Carney Smith, she is a major contributor to The Tennessee Encyclopedia of Culture and History. Her chapters on the African American civil and human rights struggle have appeared in The History of African Americans in Tennessee: Trials and Triumphs (2002); Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times (2009); and the latest edition of The African American Almanac.

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book blossomed out of our participation in activities surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. At that time, in April 2008 , we participated in a number of activities at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and presented papers at Memphis State University. Inspired by what we saw, heard, shared, and experienced, we also discussed the possibility of collaborating on a book on the global King. This book is the product of our collaboration and of our continuing encounter with King as an intellectual and spiritual source.

The effort and goodwill of a number of very special individuals made this volume possible. Warmest thanks are extended to Cynthia Lewis and Elaine Hall, who work in the library and archives at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia. The King documents they provided were especially important to the completion of some of the chapters of this work.

We thank Vicki L. Crawford, the Director of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection, for her support and encouragement. Despite her own crowded schedule, she graciously accepted our invitation to write the foreword to this book. Because we share her devotion to the preservation and advancement of the King legacy, we agreed to donate all proceeds from this book to the Morehouse King Collection.

Christian Amondson and others at Wipf and Stock Publishers deserve a special word of gratitude for their patience and support. Despite our inability to meet deadlines, which is typically the case with collaborative efforts of this nature, the people at Wipf and Stock never put pressure on us. Their understanding and willingness to bear with us helped make this a truly pleasurable experience.

The contributors to this volume, who come from many backgrounds and parts of this nation and the world, deserve special praise and thanks for their willingness to offer interpretations of King in a global context, for the time they devoted to research and to writing excellent chapters, and for agreeing to make this book and the proceeds that derive from it a gift to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection at Morehouse College. The contributors worked patiently and graciously with us, always responding promptly and positively to our requests for revisions and improvements. All of these contributors are deeply interested in King and in the enduring struggle for global justice, democratic freedoms, and human rights, and they provide rich, incisive, and provocative essays. We are certain that readers will learn from all of them.

Foreword

Vicki L. Crawford

The scholarship on Martin Luther King, Jr. has expanded significantly over the past decade, enriching our understanding of the confluence of factors that shaped his life. Several excellent biographies of King along with numerous specialized studies in such fields as theology, sociology, religion, history, and political science have deepened our understanding of King’s intellectual and spiritual roots while tracing the trajectory that resulted in his ascendancy as a world leader. King scholars have benefited immensely from the rich corpus of writings left by King himself. These sources include the Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. at Stanford University, the extensive manuscript collections at Boston University, and the more recently acquired Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection. These repositories contain a wealth of King’s sermons, speeches, correspondence and other writings that embody King’s remarkable standing in the nation and the world.

Studies of King and the African-American freedom struggle have advanced through three phases. The first phase emphasized King’s rise to national leadership, beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955–56, continuing through the major civil rights campaigns in Birmingham, Selma, Albany, and St. Augustine, and ending with King’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968. Later studies critiqued this Montgomery to Memphis periodization and shifted emphasis away from King to the importance of local community leaders who organized and sustained movements throughout the South. Writing during the decades of the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars in this phase illuminated the roles of lesser-known activists, such as Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and James Lawson, many of whom were close to King and a vital part of his interlocking network of support. More recently, scholarship on King and the movement encompasses a fuller, more nuanced view. While recognizing King’s significance, these studies also focus on the interplay between national and local leaders and highlight aspects of movement history that have received far less emphasis. For example, new studies of King focus on the years following the 1963 March on Washington as they examine King’s incisive critique of American domestic and foreign policies, specifically focusing on his stance against the war in Vietnam and advocacy for world peace. Along these lines, current scholarship on King emphasizes his role as a global figure, or as one whose influence extended beyond the United States to other democratic freedom struggles throughout the world. While some scholars have argued that King became increasingly more radical in the years following 1964, as he spoke out against the ravages of war, rich archival documentation depicts a man who was deeply concerned with the world, particularly Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, very early in his life.

This current volume of essays, coedited by eminent King scholar Lewis V. Baldwin, along with Paul R. Dekar, significantly advances this historiographic turn toward King’s international prominence as it presents an engaging collection of essays that explicate and expound on King’s communitarian ideals in the advancement of human rights. The insightful essays in this volume frame King’s thought and action in the context of globalization, a concept in today’s parlance that addresses the profound political and economic transformations in national economies that result from developments in media, information technology, and transportation and communication systems. Through the process of globalization, the gap between wealthy and poor countries has widened to the extent that large sectors of the world’s population face widespread poverty and enormous levels of social and economic inequalities.

The emergence of globalization began in the twentieth century, during King’s lifetime. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King acknowledged the rapidly developing scientific and technological advances that deepened chasms of difference. He warned that when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. King understood with great clarity and depth how worldwide systems create and exploit differences. From this understanding, he developed the concept of the world house, or the worldwide neighborhood, where all of humanity would be valued and interconnected through the practice of peace, nonviolence, and love. As King articulated it, the full realization of the world house would require a global nonviolent strategy of resistance to eradicate the triple evils of racism, poverty, and militarism, as well as other forms of oppression.

Perhaps one of King’s most notable contributions to the struggle for civil and human rights was his ability to connect the African American freedom struggle to the anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the twentieth century. The contributors to In an Inescapable Network of Mutuality have done a superb job of presenting this global King and reminding us that he was a citizen of the world. Through a close reading and examination of King’s speeches and writings, the authors in this volume trace King’s understanding of these interconnections, as early as his formative years, continuing through his extensive education, travel, and activism. Reflecting a rich tapestry of multidisciplinary perspectives, this volume’s contributors are diverse themselves, representing a range of backgrounds that provides a unique interpretive lens for reading Martin Luther King, Jr. in context and beyond context, to quote Lewis V. Baldwin in the book’s introduction. Baldwin, Dekar, and the other contributors portray King as not only an important historical figure, but also as a compelling and present-day voice who calls us to action.

Collectively, these groundbreaking essays document King’s critical engagement with a wide and diverse network of people, ideas, and movements that helped shape his ethical, spiritual, and global understandings. Several chapters trace and include discussions of King’s journey to nonviolent civil resistance, owing considerable credit to human rights and peace activists such as Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley. As several essays clarify, King was nurtured through long-standing networks of support that included African-American leaders and others who held deep knowledge and experience with nonviolence. African-American community contact with the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi and nonviolence predated the freedom struggle of the 1950s, as leaders such as Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, and Mordecai Johnson traveled to India in the 1920s where they met and studied the Indian leader. Also, King inspired and, in turn, received moral support from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), as Dekar notes, extending his global outreach. Moreover, King was directly connected to the leadership of the World Council of Churches, where he influenced the Council’s antiracism and antiwar positions.

It is worth noting that Baldwin and Dekar have also included essays that do not shy away from critiques of King’s leadership. In Beyond Patriarchy: The Meaning of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Women of the World, written by Linda T. Wynn, a frank discussion points out the disjunctions between King’s clearly formulated concept of the beloved community and his conventional views on women. Here we encounter a King whose ideals sometimes exceeded his own personal limitations. While King was an outspoken critic of racism, materialism, and militarism, his critique of structural forms of oppression failed to include patriarchy, a formidable oppression that restricts the freedom of a vast and disproportionate share of the world’s women. But Wynn contends that despite this omission, King’s ethic of global human rights is still instructive in today’s struggle for women’s equality.

The final section of In an Inescapable Network of Mutuality offers important contemporary explorations of King’s meaning for nation-building and the expansion of democratic freedoms throughout the world. In varying contexts, including the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, the authors deftly analyze King’s legacy and ponder its possibilities for world peace and social justice amidst escalating violence, irresolvable differences, and continuing turmoil. Taken together, these essays extend the conversation around King’s global vision as they provide thought-provoking and inspiring new streams of inquiry into the application of King’s principles in our time. As a whole, this volume makes a significant contribution to King scholarship, extending its analysis beyond the conventional as it calls our attention to the relevance of King’s global ideas in a twenty-first-century world.

General Introduction

Martin Luther King, Jr. in a Global Context

Lewis V. Baldwin and Paul R. Dekar

The dreamer is the title by which Martin Luther King, Jr. is still known, admired, and respected around the world. Indeed, his contributions in many different spheres—religion, theology, philosophy, culture, ethics, politics, and social activism—are increasingly assuming global relevance and significance. Perhaps more than ever before, people worldwide appeal to King as the quintessential idealist, spiritual leader, human rights advocate, and social change agent , thus establishing King’s importance as a historical figure who actually transcends both his past and his immediate geographical context in terms of his meaning, authority, and inspiration for the current and subsequent generations.

The world in which King lived, traveled, and functioned had already become globalized on so many levels, scientifically and technologically, and King’s image of the world as a single neighborhood and emphasis on both the interrelated structure of all reality and the social nature of human existence shows that he understood this better than even many of the most perceptive thinkers and activists in his time. Also, King’s commitment to the actualization of what he variously called the beloved community, the world house, the worldwide neighborhood, a new kind of man, a new world, and a new world order allows us to study him as both a global figure and a forerunner of much of what is currently identified with globalization theory and practice.

This book goes beyond the conventional findings and claims of the scholarship on King to probe King’s international connections and impact. The purpose is not only to retrieve the historical King, but also to foster critical engagement with King in a twenty-first-century world. The essential question, then, is one of contextualization. What happens when King’s ideas and methods are contextualized in his own time, place, and generation, and in ours as well? Is King really meaningful and relevant in this contemporary age of globalization? How are we to understand and interpret King’s message to and enduring impact on various parts of the world? What is the meaning of King’s life and legacy for a multicultural and multi-religious world—a world in which there are different and competing folkways, ideologies, and modes of thinking about life and ultimate reality? This book addresses these basic questions to some extent, while deliberately avoiding the tendency to embellish and sanitize King’s ideas and to distort and manipulate his image.

Convinced that a single-authored work on the global King would perhaps be less appealing, informative, provocative, and challenging, we set out to assemble an impressive array of contributors from various parts of the world to produce a piece that is both multi-authored and multidisciplinary in focus. Some of the contributors to this volume are educators and scholars, others are religious leaders, still others are activists, and a few have lived and continue to live and function in all of these worlds. Some might be realistically characterized as the intellectual-activist type, or what Antonio Gramsci labels the organic intellectual, for they have, at particular times in their lives, combined ideas and the life of the mind with a commitment to social activism and social change.

In any case, all of the contributors were selected for essentially three reasons. First, because their various cultural backgrounds, social locations, and walks of life, so to speak, make them ideally suited to reflect, in clear and profound ways, on King as a social prophet and activist with global status. Second, they offer a rich variety of perspectives—historical, cultural, religious, ethical, social, and political—which have developed out of their own life involvements, experiences, and struggles in different geographical contexts. Finally, they are especially equipped to explain how King might speak eloquently and authoritatively to a new generation of intellectuals and activists across the globe today.

There are three major parts to this book. Part I, titled For a World Made New: Exposing the Global Martin Luther King, Jr., consists of three chapters. Chapter 1, written by the religious historian Lewis V. Baldwin, discusses King in his own global context while also treating him as a forerunner and critic of much of what is defined as globalization theory and practice today, particularly as this relates to the call for global justice, the advancement of democratic freedoms and human rights, and the transnational sharing and/or exchange of the kinds of ideas, values, and material goods that serve the most cherished intellectual, cultural, economic, social, political, and religious interests of the entire human family. Baldwin reminds us that King was indeed a global figure, a citizen of the world, at heart and in mind, and that any understanding of King that ignores or downplays his global significance and impact is deeply distorted at best. Baldwin further contends that a serious study of King and globalization, which should begin with a consideration of his vision of the world house, reminds us of how certain ideas and modes of thinking about life, humanity, and the world extend across generations.

This first chapter essentially concerns reading Martin Luther King, Jr. in context and beyond context, and it prepares the ground for the content that unfolds in the subsequent chapters. The chapter actually draws on Baldwin’s Toward the Beloved Community: Martin Luther King, Jr. and South Africa (1995), which was the first book-length work published on the global King. Readers of this chapter are challenged to understand King as a religious leader, idealist, and activist in his own historical context, and also as a historical figure who is meaningful, authoritative, and inspirational for millions worldwide who remember and are still influenced by his efforts to create a world free of bigotry, intolerance, injustice, and violence. King emerges here as not merely a figure of the past, but of the present and future as well. While King no longer lives, his words, ideas, and activities are of enduring value for a world that must still, as King so often put it, make a choice between nonviolent coexistence and violent coannihilation.

Chapter 2 is coauthored by Baldwin and Paul R. Dekar, professor emeritus of Evangelism and Mission at Memphis Theological Seminary. This chapter highlights King’s message to what King labeled the white world and the colored world. Particular attention is devoted to how King described or defined these two worlds, and to the different ways in which he approached them on the levels of both ideas and activism. It is clear that King had both the same and different messages for these two worlds, for he understood essential differences between them even as he struggled for a sense of global oneness. Baldwin and Dekar employ King’s image of the world as a single neighborhood to show that King’s sense of both a white world and a colored world was realistic and not necessarily inconsistent with his ideal of a global beloved community, and that King ultimately had a vision of world community that included peoples of all colors and creeds. King knew that pushing a particularistic agenda in a global context, rooted in race and color differences, was not only immoral and unethical, but also impractical and unrealistic.

Drawing on Baldwin’s published books and articles on King and Africa, and on Dekar’s speeches and published and unpublished essays on King and Latin America and the Caribbean, this second chapter builds on the first one, particularly in terms of establishing King as a thinker and activist of global status. It reveals that King’s world vision, and his sense of the American Negro’s role in the actualization of that vision, grew out of his travels, observations, and study of the vast landscape of humanity. Chapter 2 also explains King’s meaning and relevance for white peoples and peoples of color worldwide today, a topic that has been woefully neglected in the extant scholarship on this phenomenal figure. Chapters 1 and 2, when considered jointly, actually frame the general concern of In an Inescapable Network of Mutuality: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Globalization of an Ethical Ideal, thus opening the way for the more topic-specific concerns treated in the subsequent chapters of this volume.

Chapter 3, the last in Part I, focuses essentially on the meaning of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the women of the world. Written by Linda T. Wynn, who teaches courses on women and civil rights at Fisk University, this chapter convincingly argues that King’s androcentric leadership style, rhetoric, dialogues with others, and policy solutions were partriarchal-based and customary to other male civil rights and church leaders of his time. Wynn goes on to maintain that King and other male leaders lacked genuine respect for black women as leaders in the civil rights movement, that they never seriously addressed the need for women’s liberation, and that King’s own male-dominated, charismatic leadership model was antithetical to his beloved community vision and ideal. But in a stunning and yet perceptive conclusion, Wynn contends that King’s ethical discourse, which is centered in the beloved community and which affirms the interrelatedness of all life and the social nature of human existence, can be of some positive value and use to women worldwide, especially as they elucidate and/or address the problem of female exclusion and subordination. Wynn’s suggestion that King’s ethos still speaks to issues that are pertinent to women everywhere will undoubtedly be questioned and even rejected by the most radical feminists and womanists, but it is well advanced and solidly grounded in a careful reading of King sources, and it will most certainly trigger considerable scholarly discussion and debate. The need for such discussion and debate in the academy, the church, and in world circles cannot be overstated in this age of globalization.

This third chapter is really groundbreaking in that it explores King’s meaning and relevance for women in a global context. No scholar, male or female, has seriously taken this approach up to this point. Wynn is not afraid to be critical of King, even as she finds meaning and potential in his world vision. She is convinced that King’s message remains instructive for women in the world house, and especially for women who are still oppressed by what she calls male-dominated global institutions.

Part II is titled A Global Quest for Common Ground: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Power of Interreligious and Intercultural Learning, and it includes chapters 4–8. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which King and the World Council of Churches (WCC) influenced each other in their efforts to end the Vietnam War and global racism. Contributed by Thomas A. Mulhall, an independent researcher trained in International Peace Studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College in Dublin, and the author of a forthcoming work on King and the WCC, this chapter shows that both King and the WCC were aware of the changing world order in the 1960s, and that both provide an essential model for how humans as a whole should relate to each other in a world that has become a global village. Mulhall’s chapter is particularly engaging and refreshing at a time when more and more questions are being raised about the ability of the church universal to remain a living, vital organism, and, more specifically, about its capacity to spearhead purposeful Christian witness and praxis in the world in this new century and millennium.

Mulhall’s chapter actually breaks new ground, for despite King’s occasional comments about the WCC in relation to issues of race and war, no scholar has written at such length on the topic. Mulhall skillfully corrects this pattern of omission in King studies, thus opening yet another window from which we might view and assess the significance of the global Martin Luther King, Jr. Mulhall’s probing remarks and rich insights are obviously informed by both his interest in the global King and his background and interest in global peace studies.

Chapter 5 discusses the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) as a critical element in King’s adoption, appropriation, and application of Gandhian nonviolence. Authored by Paul R. Dekar, a scholar and FOR activist, it builds on the discussion in chapter 4, providing another angle from which to assess and analyze global Christian influences on King. Having authored a wonderful book highlighting his own views about and experiences with the FOR, titled Creating the Beloved Community: A Journey with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (2005), Dekar begins with a powerful discussion of the rise of the FOR in Britain and the United States as embodiments of Christian nonviolence during the second decade of the twentieth century. He moves on to explain the FOR’s impact, through figures like Bayard Rustin, Glenn Smiley, and others, on both King and the black freedom movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter is immensely important for those who wish to better understand how the black freedom movement interacted with, and was influenced by, certain personalities and forces clamoring and struggling for global peace, particularly within the ranks of the FOR.

King’s involvements with and indebtedness to the FOR is a largely unknown and unexplored aspect of the historiography of the modern civil rights movement. This fifth chapter helps fill this gap in King scholarship, while also further enlightening us about the deep religious roots of King’s nonviolent theory and praxis. Dekar reminds us that King read and applied Gandhi through the prism of Christian influences, a point often overlooked by those who attribute Kingian nonviolence and civil disobedience to foreign and non-Christian sources.

Chapter 6 takes a different slant, focusing primarily on how the black American community, under King’s leadership, answered a poignant invitation to learn from Mahatma Gandhi and India. Provided by John J. Thatamanil, an Associate Professor of Theology and World Religions at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, this chapter speaks more specifically to the black community’s open-hearted reception to the theory and practice of Gandhian nonviolence. As Thatamanil puts it, King and his people in America responded in positive ways to Gandhi’s call for the hospitality of receiving, and their willingness to embrace Gandhian ideas and methods constituted a moment of interreligious receptivity. Thatamanil is equally perceptive in underscoring those theological convictions and resources that enabled King to become a hospitable recipient of Gandhian wisdom. At the same time, Thatamanil readily acknowledges Gandhi’s appreciation for the lessons of the black struggle in America, especially as expressed in the Negro spirituals. While his primary focus is on what King inherited from Gandhi, Thatamanil is sensitive to areas of similarity and interchangeability between the Indian people and black Americans, especially in the realm of values. Clearly, this is why the southern Negroes could adopt and adapt Gandhian ideas and methods without doing essential violence to their own Christian faith and worldview.

Generally speaking, Thatamanil is interested in showing how certain kinds of values and traditions transcend religious and cultural differences. His insistence that there was a genuine reciprocity and a vital spiritual kinship that joined the communities and movements of Gandhi and King, particularly at the levels of ideas and methods, is quite convincing, and it suggests possibilities for interreligious and intercultural dialogue and learning today. In other words, Thatamanil offers other examples of how Gandhi, King, and the movements they led might be meaningful or relevant for today’s hostile, violent, and fragmented world.

Chapter 7 advances this position to another level, with special attention to Gandhian and Kingian nonviolence as a moral imperative for action in the globalized world. Written by Mary E. King, a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Peace, an affiliate of the United Nations, this chapter begins with an interesting and provocative discussion of how Gandhi’s ideas, strategies, and tactics from India’s struggle for independence were adopted and practically applied by King and others in the struggle against Jim Crow in the southern United States in the 1950s and 1960s. While arguing that King found in Gandhi’s thought and social praxis rich resources and opportunities for learning, Mary King is also mindful of the creative and distinctive cast King brought to his own perspective on and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience. Her chapter, like John Thatamanil’s, offers rich insights into how the Indian people and blacks in America were positively transformed through their encounters with each other. Both are far more interested in what the two peoples shared than what they did not share.

Mary King is also interested in appeals to Gandhi’s and King’s authority and inspiration by the generations that have followed them. She notes that the ideas and methods of Gandhi and King have been appropriated and applied by any number of peoples and recent popular movements, including the Poles, East Germans, Czechs and Slovaks, the Burmese, Palestinians, Guatemalans, and the Thais. Mary King goes on to conclude that nonviolent civil disobedience has increased in political significance on virtually every continent since King’s murder. According to Mary King, perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the legacy of Gandhi and King is the fact that oppressed peoples today are far more efficient and effective in using creative nonviolent means than oppressors are in developing and employing new methods of repression.

In chapter 8, Roy Money, a biostatistician in the psychiatry department at Yale University, examines King’s language of interdependence as repeatedly and consistently expressed in variations of two phrases; namely, a network of mutuality and the interrelatedness of all life. King’s use of this language, Money contends, distinguished him from other civil rights leaders in his time. Money goes on to identify the main sources of King’s language of interdependence, while also pointing to other sources that are especially relevant to that language. Money maintains that there is a rich history of similar language in Buddhist literature, as evident in the concepts of interbeing, interdependent arising, or dependent origination, which provide a larger context for understanding this kind of language. Money also suggests that King’s language of interdependence is essentially restated in the Dalai Lama’s call for the development of universal responsibility.

This eighth chapter speaks perceptively to King’s ability to craft language that was not only powerful and persuasive, but also universal, inclusive, and redemptive. King’s language of interdependence, as Money suggests, affords yet another vantage point from which to assess the dimensions of his world vision. Such an approach is at best refreshing, enlightening, and stimulating, for it lays bare a side of King that is too often slighted even by scholars who treat him as a homiletician and rhetorician.

Part III is titled Linked in a Single Garment of Destiny: Martin Luther King, Jr., Nation-Building, and the Challenges of an Interdependent World, and it consists of chapters 9–14. In chapter 9, Noel Leo Erskine, Professor of Theology and Ethics at Candler School of Theology, asserts that King-led civil rights campaigns in America proved enormously significant for people in the Caribbean as they sought to understand and pursue nation-building. Some of the values of King, writes Erskine, were transported to the Caribbean, especially the emphasis on human dignity, economic empowerment and equality, and the beloved community ideal. At the same time, Erskine dispels any notion that the movements in the Caribbean and the southern United States were identical, declaring that the challenge for Caribbean people in the 1950s and 1960s was not Jim Crow and racial integration but the overthrow of imperialist policies and a lifestyle of dependence fostered by colonialism. According to Erskine, this explains why Marcus M. Garvey, the Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist and advocate for African repatriation, was more influential in some circles than King. Even so, one ultimately has to think in terms of how both figures came together in the consciousness of Caribbean people.

As Erskine observes, King’s protest tactics never really registered with great force among most Caribbean people, largely because they failed to see the need for racial integration, and because of the pervasive view that church leaders should not seriously engage matters of a political nature. Thus, one has to speak in terms of King’s ambiguous legacy in the Caribbean—ambiguous in the sense that it is subject to more than one interpretation. Although not as extensive as the Haitian leader François Duvalier’s book-length tribute to King, Erskine’s chapter is in some ways the strongest statement available on King’s meaning for the Caribbean.

In chapter 10, Crystal A. DeGregory, who teaches history at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee, traces the relationship between King-led civil rights campaigns in America and Lynden O. Pindling-led Progressive Liberal Party activities in the Bahamas, declaring that this is part of the largely unexplored global dimensions of King’s life and work. DeGregory reminds us that the Commonwealth of the Bahamas and its transformation from a British colonial outpost to a black independent nation paralleled developments with King and the civil rights movement. According to DeGregory, it was through Pindling that King’s influence was most significantly felt in the Bahamas. The relationship between the struggles in the Bahamas and the United States, says DeGregory, was supremely embodied in the personalities, tactics, and aspirations of King and Pindling.

This tenth chapter also breaks new ground in the scholarship on Martin Luther King, Jr., for no scholar has written in such compelling terms about King’s meaning for people in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. As one who has thoroughly researched both the path toward nationhood in the Bahamas and the struggle for civil rights in America, DeGregory is eminently qualified to write with authority about these issues. Needless to say, her chapter adds yet another piece to the puzzle that was and is the global King.

Chapter 11 was written by Peter Cousins, an Oxford University–trained peace activist who served as an international accompanier and human rights observer with the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation in San José de Apartadó and Bogotá, Colombia. Cousins examines the influence of King across Latin America, with a particular focus on citizen-led, nonviolent initiatives in Colombia that draw on and reflect King’s thinking. He also discusses the declining significance of nonviolence in national reform movements in parts of Latin America, where even many young Catholic priests have joined or are joining guerilla movements. This chapter, much like Noel Erskine’s, points to the ambiguous side of the King legacy, particularly as it relates to Latin America.

Cousins is highly sensitive to what King thought about America’s role in the world, and especially in Latin America. Moreover, Cousins suggests that King, in relating to Latin America, sought to embody the best of what he felt the United States could and should be within the global community—namely, a nation that relates to the rest of the world with understanding, compassion, and goodwill, not out of ignorance, arrogance, and military might. Here the global King is viewed and discussed from the perspective of one who is, in his own right, both a scholar and social activist.

King’s significance for Latin America is explored in a somewhat different vein by Francisco Rodés, who teaches church history at the Ecumenical Seminary in Matanzas, Cuba, and who serves as pastor of the First Baptist Church there. In chapter 12, Rodés highlights the inspiration and example of Martin Luther King, Jr. for Cubans, especially when it comes to social causes and a sense of social responsibility and commitment. In Rodés’s estimation, King also showed Cubans, including himself, how the church might serve as a reservoir of hope and change, thus contributing to the increased interest in Christianity in Cuba after the King assassination. The role of the churches in solidifying the Cuban people around just causes and popular education is, for Rodés, in part a testimony to the power of King’s legacy.

Rodés identifies two major developments that reflect King’s enduring influence for this generation of Cubans. One is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center, a macro-ecumenical organization of Christian inspiration that is based among the Cuban people and their churches. The other is Latin American liberation theology, a popular theology that is critical, liberating, and contextualized. Rodés asserts that King’s legacy, through the King Memorial Center, is actually linked to certain streams of this liberation theology.

Chapter 13, authored by Rabbi Everett Gendler, discusses King in relation to the Holy Land and the Middle East crisis, a subject also treated to some extent in Rabbi Marc Schneier’s Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Jewish Community (1999). Gendler, a retired rabbi who marched with King in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma, and who has taught nonviolent ideas and methods in various parts of the world, including the Teaching Training School for the exile school system in Dharamsala, India, discusses the impact King might have had had he visited the Holy Land and given his active support to a peaceful resolution of the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to Rabbi Gendler, King, like Gandhi, never took to the Holy Land his charismatic embodiment of the efficacy and power of nonviolence. Gendler is much more sensitive than Rabbi Schneier to what he terms the tragedy of King’s absence in the Holy Land. Had King visited and gotten involved in that part of the world, Gendler surmises, he may well have affected its destiny in positive and profound ways in his time.

Rabbi Gendler concludes that if King were alive today, the question of a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis would perhaps receive immediate and careful scrutiny from him. Such a conclusion is difficult to dismiss, especially since King had moved toward a more enlightened and explicit globalism by the time of his death. Rabbi Gendler imagines King coming up with an economic-religious-spiritual approach to the perplexing problem of settlements, which fuels the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, taking into account those who are displaced in the process. Rabbi Gendler goes on to highlight King’s belief, expressed in 1967, that the United Nations should get involved to insure Israel’s right to exist in a state of security, and the Palestinians’ right to a life free of poverty. In the final analysis, Rabbi Gendler is convinced that these and any other approaches recommended and pursued by King would affirm the basic human needs and dignity of all the contenders.

Chapter 14 is the last one in Part III. Contributed by Mary Gendler, a retired clinical psychologist, who has also taught nonviolence at the Teachers Training Institute in Dharamsala, India, this chapter treats the meaning of King for Tibetans who struggle under Chinese occupation. Recalling the experiences she and her husband, Rabbi Everett Gendler, have had with Tibetan exiles in India, Mary Gendler reports that many Tibetans see parallels between King’s struggle in America and their own, and that they have evidenced a willingness to relate the issues King faced to their own personal struggles. Mary Gendler also insists that King’s vision of a just and peaceful world is echoed in recent times by the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people, who are also clamoring for and in search of freedom, justice, and human dignity through nonviolence. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Tibetan Plateau are not an unlikely pairing.

Mary Gendler’s chapter, like others in this volume, gives readers a sense of King’s continuing global impact. This, too, is an example of how we might move beyond the historical King, or the King who actually lived, spoke, and struggled, to interpret King beyond context. For Mary Gendler, and for other contributors to this volume, reflecting on King’s ideas and struggles in different times and places does not necessarily present an insurmountable historical problem. Hence, these contributors constantly move between historical analysis and contemporary issues in their treatments of King.

For so many people, thinking of King in global terms amounts to a venture into the horizon of the unfamiliar. By orienting the focus to the global King, this book transcends the King who is routinely identified with the United States and its race problem, and it reveals that King played and continues to play a far more significant role in furthering world peace and community than is usually known or imagined. This volume also exposes readers to some of the best current thinking concerning the global King and his legacy. It reconstructs hitherto