Research Showcase: “A Common Struggle”: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Endorsement of Ahmed Ben Bella and African Anticolonial Movements

The forthcoming Volume VIII of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. provides a detailed discussion of the planning, execution, and consequences of the major events from September 1962–December 1963. This section will showcase the more unfamiliar aspects in our volume research, giving a glimpse into King’s activities and the broader scope of the civil rights movement.

By David Lai, Assistant Editor

When Algerian premier Ahmed Ben Bella traveled to the United States to attend the United Nations General Assembly session in October 1962, the State Department asked what he would most like to do during his time in New York City. Ben Bella replied that he would like to meet Martin Luther King, Jr. As King’s former advisor Clarence B. Jones remembers, the State Department called King’s office in Atlanta, and King’s secretary in turn called Jones to arrange the visit with King, which was held at the home of the Algerian Ambassador to the United Nations in Riverdale, New York. During the two-hour meeting between the Algerian Ambassador, Ben Bella, King, and Jones, King and Ben Bella found common cause, endorsing each other in a subsequent press conference. Ben Bella—who, Jones recalls, “was encyclopedic about his knowledge of the civil rights movement in the United States”—declared segregation a cancer, asserting that the United States would lose its “moral and political voice” in the world should it allow discrimination to continue. King, meanwhile, claimed solidarity with Algerian anticolonialism, stating, “The battle of the Algerians against colonialism and the battle of the Negro against segregation is a common struggle.” Some questioned why King would link Algerian independence with the civil rights movement, observing that Algeria’s violent revolution clashed with King’s nonviolent philosophy and that Algeria’s neutralist foreign policy deviated from American interests. In the context of such criticisms, King’s support for Algeria demonstrates his willingness to challenge Cold War-era norms and presages his later, and more famous, opposition to the Vietnam War.

At first glance, the American civil rights movement had many tactical differences with Algeria’s armed revolution. Although King’s earlier visits to newly independent Ghana in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960 went smoothly, King’s meeting with Ben Bella proved to be more controversial because of the Algerian Revolution’s brutal nature. The conflict, which spanned from 1954–1962, resulted in an estimated 1.5 million Algerian lives lost due to war-related causes, twenty-five thousand French soldiers killed, and both sides accusing the other of widespread civilian torture. One letter writer found King’s approval of Ben Bella irreconcilable with the stated aims of the civil rights movement because the movement was struggling for “democracy and equality for all citizens,” while Ben Bella had only “substituted a new brand of dictatorship for the evil of French colonialism.” Conservative columnist William F. Buckley also questioned why “Dr. King, prince of peace, is attracted to the drastically different approach of Ben Bella—the man who sanctioned every atrocity in the encyclopaedia of terror to win his own way.” Similar to how city leaders in Albany, Georgia, accused King of being an outside agitator stirring up dissension while ignoring the second-class status of Albany's black citizens, onlookers condemned Algeria’s methods without considering its goal of self-determination amidst oppressive colonial violence.

Also, Algeria’s foreign policy, much like that of North Vietnam, raised suspicion from Cold War America. Days before meeting with King, Ben Bella spoke at the United Nations and announced Algeria’s commitment to anticolonialism, an independent Palestine, and a neutralist posture in Cold War affairs. Buckley observed that Ben Bella’s statement focused on Africans but ignored Eastern European nations “suffering under the colonialism of the Soviet Union,” suggesting that Algeria’s titular neutrality was disguised anti-Americanism. During his trip to the Americas, Ben Bella also visited Cuba and declared friendship with Fidel Castro, leading the Kennedy Administration to reconsider its offer to send foreign aid to Algeria. Earlier in 1962, Ben Bella had also pledged one hundred thousand troops to aid Egypt in a potential war against Israel, which led one correspondent to object that Ben Bella’s statement criticizing the United States was “singular hypocrisy.” Some Americans viewed these actions as tantamount to supporting communism. Months later, Alabama governor George Wallace raised King’s meeting with Ben Bella, calling the Algerian leader “a Communist in my opinion” to suggest that King was also a Communist by association. Similar to the 7 April 1967 New York Times editorial claiming King neglected Vietnamese culpability and was “whitewashing Hanoi” by opposing ongoing American intervention in Vietnam, these critics dismissed King’s sympathy with anticolonial movements through an alternative narrative that painted Algeria as dangerous and a threat to American interests.

While King conceded that he had tactical differences with Ben Bella, he maintained his general assertion that worldwide liberation movements coincided with domestic civil rights concerns. To one critic, King privately clarified that his meeting with Ben Bella “was in no way designed to indicate support of his views but rather as an opportunity to share with the Premier some of our ideas on Democracy, non-violence and the world community.” In his press release about the meeting, King also claimed that Ben Bella supported tactical nonviolence in America and “expressed the wish that their fight for independence might have been nonviolent,” which minimized the differences between the movements as differences in circumstance. Accepting the violence in Algeria served as King’s tacit admission that nonviolence was not universally applicable.

However, King maintained that the movement remained inextricably tied to anticolonial struggles happening across the globe. For one, Ben Bella’s claim that the United States must address racism at home, along with similar statements from other world leaders, put pressure on the federal government to appear friendly to civil rights to maintain its global standing. Otherwise, King observed, “The price that America must pay for the continued oppression of the Negro is the price of its own destruction.” King acknowledged the value of this international scrutiny and recognized that the African-American freedom struggle benefited from worldwide support.

Beyond the practical benefits, the movements also found common cause because the forces opposing them were similar. A month later, King stated at the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa, “As long as segregation and discrimination exist in our nation, the longer the chances of survival are for colonialism and vice versa, for the very same set of complex politico-economic forces are operative in both instances.” King highlighted “the choice between political expediency and that which is morally compelling” operating both in international affairs and in domestic discrimination. He criticized military intervention on behalf of Cold War allies practicing colonialism, observing that “the current struggle to win the minds of men and nations to the free world will not be won militarily” but instead through supporting freedom movements seeking self-determination.

This commentary would appear later in King’s famous 4 April 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” address. There, King again decried America for choosing economic and political expediency over morality. He charged that the United States served “the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up on the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” Instead of pursuing military intervention in North Vietnam and elsewhere, the United States “must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.”

By meeting with Ahmed Ben Bella, King demonstrates his willingness to use his influence to address world affairs years prior to receiving his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. While endorsing Algeria gave yet more ammunition to King’s critics, it provided the civil rights movement with valuable support from a prominent world leader. Moreover, King’s claim that the movement was inextricably linked with worldwide liberation suggests that King was already uneasy with the Cold War consensus in 1962. The United States’ ill-fated political alliances with reactionary heads of state and its costly military expeditions would continue to draw funding and attention away from domestic matters in the coming years. Supporting Algerian liberation in 1962 suggests why King felt that “my conscience leaves me no other choice” but to speak out against Vietnam in 1967, despite the much greater personal and political cost to oppose that endeavor.