The Civil Rights Movement in World Perspective

Abstract

The Mighty Sparrow, a calypso performer from Trinidad, sang in 1963, at a perilous juncture during the civil rights movement, “I was born in the USA but because of my color I'm suffering today.” “The white man preaching democracy but in truth and in fact it's hypocrisy,” Sparrow continued, warning that he was “getting vexed.” His proposed solution was the song's up-tempo refrain: “So—we want Martin Luther King for President!” Sparrow put his irreverent humor to deadly serious purpose, his song indicting both temporizing U.S. officials during the Birmingham crisis and a nation far from ready to elect a black president. Recorded for Caribbean audiences, including immigrants to the U.S., Sparrow's topical song reminds us, along with a number of recent studies, that the activities of King and the civil rights movement were keenly observed by audiences from all over the world. Until quite recently, U.S. historians were accustomed to thinking of the civil rights movement within a domestic U.S.-based framework. But in its time, the movement had global dimensions that were abundantly clear to many contemporaries, including Sparrow, King, and many others, as this essay will show. Recent scholarship has engaged the ways in which the consciousness of civil rights leaders and black activists was in fact a worldview, a framework linking local and global events and perspectives. At the same time, that scholarship has yet to make a discernible impact in college and secondary school U.S. history textbooks. If the civil rights movement is covered in undergraduate surveys or high school classes (and sadly, we should not assume that even the most basic history of the movement is routinely taught), its story often remains a nation-based account of the response of presidential administrations to southern racial upheavals, with King as the movement's main protagonist.