Extract

When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war in Vietnam on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, he was quickly condemned by other civil rights leaders, the media, and the president of the United States. They argued that he should not mix his civil rights activism with international politics, that he should stick to the subject he knew. Yet as Jonathan Rosenberg stated in How Far the Promised Land? King was continuing a tradition of “color-conscious internationalism” that was at least a half century old (p. 1).

According to Rosenberg, color-conscious internationalism had three key characteristics: the conviction that transnational institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations had a critical role to play in domestic politics as well as in the international arena; the notion that America had a critical role in shaping world politics that it could not fulfill as long as blacks were oppressed; the desire for people to cooperate across national borders (especially the “imagined communities” of reformers).

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