Message from the Director

By Tenisha Armstrong, Director

“All mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

– King, “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution,” Address at Oberlin College, 14 June 1965

When Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 15 January 1929, his parents named him “Michael” after his father.

Following a 1934 trip to Berlin, Germany, to attend the Fifth Baptist World Alliance Congress, Michael King, Sr., returned to Atlanta so inspired by his travels and the Protestant reformer Martin Luther that he changed his name and that of his first-born son to Martin Luther King. Thirty years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., seized the opportunity to visit Berlin, a much different city than the one his father visited.

A September 1964 trip to the then-three-year-old Berlin Wall, which divided the Soviet-occupied East side of the city from the French, British, and U.S.-occupied West side, offered King the chance to draw parallels between black and white race relations in the United States and communism and democracy in Berlin. Just as the United States was “proving to be the testing ground of races living together in spite of their differences,” King told East and West Berliners, “you are testing the possibility of co-existence for the two ideologies which now compete for world dominance.”

Invitations from Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin who King had met in the United States in 1961, and Heinrich Grüber, the former pastor of St. Mary’s Church in East Berlin, provided the impetus for King’s visit to the city. Grüber, a former prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, lived in West Berlin after being expelled from East Berlin for his anti-government views. “I write in the bond of the same faith, knowing your experience are the same as ours were,” Grüber wrote in a letter to King. He confessed that “during the time of Hitler, I was often ashamed of being a German, as today I am ashamed of being white.” King accepted both invitations.

Arriving in West Berlin on 12 September 1964, King, who was accompanied by his friend Ralph Abernathy, prepared for a packed schedule of events. These included a reception in his honor, an address before twenty thousand spectators at an outdoor rally, sermons at various churches, and remarks at the Berlin Jazz Festival.

King’s visit to the western side of the Berlin Wall was marred when, earlier that day, East Berlin guards shot and wounded a man after he attempted to scale the wall into West Berlin. Upon hearing that an American soldier had rescued the man, King rushed to the scene and spoke to residents living in nearby apartments, witnessing firsthand the bullet holes in the dwelling’s windows and walls.

To the dismay of the United States government, King insisted on visiting East Berlin as well. In an effort to prevent him from entering, the U.S. State Department confiscated King’s passport. Undeterred, King showed the checkpoint guards, who requested official identification, a credit card, and he was allowed to enter East Germany. Again, he faced a grueling schedule, including a visit with local clergy, a meet-and-greet with African students from Humboldt University, several impromptu appearances to accommodate the crowds of people wanting to hear King speak, and a stop at St. Mary’s Church, where he addressed an overflow gathering. Beginning his sermon by conveying “Christian greetings from your brothers and sisters in West Berlin,” to which some in the crowd sobbed, King endeared himself to the people of East Berlin: “I come to you not altogether as a stranger, for the name that I happen to have is a name so familiar to you, so familiar to Germany, and so familiar to the world, and I am happy that my parents decided to name me after the great Reformer.” 

King referenced the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians to unite the struggles of Berliners with those of black people in the United States. Professing not to be an expert on German politics, King claimed that “the Gospels speak directly . . . about the responsibility which we have for one another regardless of the differences of race and nation.” He further told the captivated audience: “It is not difficult for us to go a step further and assume that wherever reconciliation is taking place, wherever men are ‘breaking down the dividing walls of hostility,’ which separate them from their brothers, there Christ continues to perform his ministry of reconciliation.” He later told the congregation that although Berlin stands as a “symbol of the divisions of men,” those on “either side of the wall are God’s children and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact,” in what amounted to a bold affirmation of the God-given dignity of all people.

Though Germans seemed familiar with the African-American freedom struggle, King talked about the “great social revolution” uniting twenty million in the United States against the evils of segregation and discrimination. He introduced the East Germans to luminary Rosa Parks, whose act of courage on a city bus sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, and the great Mahatma Gandhi, whose nonviolent philosophy provided a method for mass movements. The civil rights movement began, King claimed, “not by the plans of men, but by one of the accidents of God,” calling upon his people to “suffer if necessary, to face death, and to die if this be the price of faith.” According to a United States Foreign Service report on King’s visit, the American civil rights leader discussed the movement so that East Berliners could recognize parallels to their own experiences.

King only spent thirty-six hours in Berlin before departing for Munich, but his brief time there was very impactful. German scholars have written that King’s visit raised Germans’ awareness of the African-American freedom struggle and promoted their own use of nonviolent resistance, especially among those who campaigned for the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, a professor of transatlantic history and cultures at the University of Augsburg, noted that East German opposition movements marched to “We Shall Overcome,” the unofficial anthem of the American civil rights movement.

King’s Berlin trip demonstrates how the black freedom struggle in the United States resonated across the globe with other individuals struggling for liberation. This quarter’s issue of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project newsletter explores such connections to highlight the international dimensions of the American civil rights movement. In our research showcase section, assistant editor David Lai discusses King’s October 1962 meeting with Algerian premier Ahmed Ben Bella, demonstrating how King’s endorsement of Algeria’s revolution against French colonization prefigured his later opposition to the Vietnam War. Research assistant Brynn Raymond previews one of the documents selected for publication in Volume VIII, showing how King’s November 1962 address at the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa centered the power of solidarity across diasporic communities to secure the right to self-determination for African and African-American citizens alike. We also mourn the recent death of civil rights leader Rabbi Israel Dresner in our “In Memoriam” section, where research assistant Meghan Weaver recognizes Dresner’s long participation in both American and international liberation movements. Finally, research assistant Gabrielle Corona profiles long-serving staff member Lai, allowing readers to better know the individuals working to prepare King’s papers for publication.