Martin Luther King makes references to Adolph Hitler, the situation in Hungary, and the civil rights movement in China and Africa. The reason he does this is to remind the clergymen that America is part of a larger, global community. He mentions Adolph Hitler to give an example of a man who made laws that had to be broken. The mention of Hitler also does two more things: first, it compares the actions of the United States against the Negro to the actions of Hitler against the Jewish community, and second, it gives an example of someone whom the United States fought against in the name of justice and democracy, a fight that King wanted bring to the United States.
The Hungarian freedom fighters are mentioned so that King can equate the Civil Rights movement in the United States with the uprising in Hungary. They were a group that had many sympathetics in the United States and King wanted to garner that same support in the United States.
China and Africa are mentioned to put the United States to shame. The United States had the platitude of a true democracy to the rest of world, yet other nations were further along in the struggle for civil rights than the United States. If the United States truly wanted to be the world leader in the fight for democracy, it would have to show that it was further advanced than any other nation.
This viewpoint has created some controversy as to the reasons behind both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Brown v Board of Education court decision. In an article appearing in the Stanford Law journal entitled "Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative" it was proposed that the motivation behind these reforms was not human rights, but global image. In order for the United States to stand strong against Communist Russia in the Cold War, the United States would have to clean up its image as a racist country.
Later in his life, Martin Luther King became very active in the global community. He received the Nobel Peace prize and become enmeshed in world politics, such as segregation in other countries, feeding the poor, and stopping the war in Vietnam.
Link to Explanation of Brown v Board of Education
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