The Civil Rights movement that Martin Luther King Jr. was a significant part of had a big impact on King. Events in the Civil Rights movement had major impacts on his thinking and impacted his future actions. King understood the inequality in the U.S and knew that the United States was far from the only place where inequalities were faced. King wrote the "World House" to share his opinions on World inequality and his ideas on how to fix it. The World House is a metaphor used by King to illustrate the idea that everyone on the Earth is basically living in one big house, and in this big house, everyone should be equal. The abundance of events involving civil rights and poverty on the national and global scale influenced Martin Luther King Jr's ideas; they influenced his view on nonviolence protesting and the way he viewed the World's inequality problems.

On February 18, 1965 an innocent 26 year old African American man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and killed by a State Trooper in Marion Alabama (Selma to Montgomery March). Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot during a police attack while trying to protect his mother; the police were attacking nonviolent protesters. This caused outrage across the nation, and civil rights activist immediately began discussing their plans on how to use this event to bring more power to their cause. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC ) planned a march from Selma to Montgomery. The march was led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis and the march was stopped when they came up to the bridge. On March 7, 1965 protesters marched to the Edmund Pettus Bridge where they were met by law enforcement (Selma to Montgomery March). The marchers were ordered to leave and separate but refused to, which resulted in police severely beating the crowd. Protesters were beaten with clubs and tear gas was thrown at the crowd. This was all covered by journalists and news stations across the nation, and John Lewis, one of the leaders of the march, was beaten badly by police and begged for help from President Lyndon B Johnson (Selma to Montgomery March). This cry for help and the national spotlight got President Lyndon B. Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act. Martin Luther King Jr. saw how effective nonviolent protesting could be from . He understood that if blacks were to go around violently protesting and lashing out at white people then they would never get anything accomplished. When innocent people are being attacked, more attention will be given and specifically positive attention unlike the negative attention that would be brought about from violence. 

In the World House King says, "A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together. This is the great new problem of mankind." What this means is that now that the world is closer than ever; everybody has to find a peaceful and fair way to live together. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that poverty and racial inequality needed to be fixed not just in the U.S but on the global scale( King 284). The events in the United States such as Selma, Rosa Parks showed King firsthand what and how inequality feels. These experiences did not just make him focus on just the United State's problem however but made him think of the world as a whole. In the United States wealth and power were mostly retained by white people and the used their power to keep their power by taking it away from African Americans and those who were poorer. This concept can be applied to the world as well, instead of white people controlling a country, a few powerful nations control the World. In both instances there is a severe gap in the distributions in wealth and those in control of the wealth choose not to share it. In the World House, King says, "A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies" (King), This means that the world needs to start thinking as one and thinking what is best for everyone not just themselves or their country. 

If everyone thought about the good of everybody else, then the problems of inequality and severe poverty would be erased. Dr. Gary Percesepe says in his analysis of King's speech, " The United States, King believes the richest and most powerful nation in the world has a responsibility to lead the way in this revolution of values. What prevents us from paying adequate wages to school teachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations? He answers: It is a lack of vision" ( Percesepe). The lack of vision is one of the fundamental problems with inequality and is why problems of poverty and inequality still exist today. If nobody was gaining anything from other people being impoverished and having less rights than those problems wouldn't exist. However people and companies make billions of dollars off of the poverty and inequality in the world. Why would Nike move its factories from China and impoverished countries where they pay workers pennies a day to the United States where they would have to pay each worker minimum wage of at least 7.25 dollars an hour? The problem of greed and the desire for wealth are big obstacles in the way of World equality.

Besides the distribution of wealth that leads to poverty, there are lots of other ways countries are taken advantage of. Countries resources are often taken over by foreign powerful countries that do care about the people living there. Countries get their resources gorged from them and get very little return, and what they do get in return is normally taken by the top percent in that country or those in power. Many core countries currently outsource processes that cause large economic degradation to smaller periphery countries. One of  the reasons for this is that in the core people have enough money to prevent their environment from being taken advantage of and smaller countries do not. Big companies move in and destroy that country's environment without any consideration of how that will impact others and the possible collapse it could cause on that area's agriculture.  King believed that this was fundamentally wrong and that people should not think locally or nationally but globally. If everyone in the United States thought about the children working endlessly for pennies in factories in the periphery, then people would do something to solve the problem. Instead people are too focused on themselves and would rather get their shoes made in a factory on the other side of the world where people are getting taken advantage of so they can save a few dollars on their shoes. King argued that if people thought in the "World House" perspective that this problem would not exist. If people were to think about the people in those factories across the world as their neighbors instead of not thinking or caring about them at all, then the World would be a much better place.

If Martin Luther King Jr grew up after the Civil Rights Era his thoughts and ideas would not have been influenced in the same way. Since he did grow up in times of inequality and saw the pain and suffering African Americans were unjustly facing, he was influenced by it. Each event in the movement influenced how King and other activists thought about their best course of action. King saw what tactics failed and which worked, and this factored into his planning the next time he met with leaders.  If Selma was a planned violent protest and had the successful result Civil Rights activists wanted, then maybe Martin Luther King Jr would change his ideas on nonviolence. The civil rights era and events like Selma caused him to view the world differently and caused him how to think how he could change it.

