 Martin Luther King Jr. played a significant part in the Civil Rights movement, and the movement also 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 Earth is  living in one big house, and in this big house, everyone should be equal. King grew up in a time of change and turbulence, but the events such as Selma and Lyndon B Johnson's response to Selma showed how progress could be achieved nonviolently. 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 nonviolent protesting and the way he viewed the World's inequality problems.

One of the events that had a big impact on Martin Luther King Jr was the Selma march; on February 18, 1965 an innocent twenty six year old African American man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and killed by a State Trooper in Marion, Alabama (Stanford). 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. On March 7, 1965 protesters marched to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the march was led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis. The march was stopped by law enforcement  when the protesters approached the bridge (Stanford). The marchers were ordered to leave and separate but refused to, this 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 viciously by police and begged for help from President Lyndon B Johnson (Stanford). President Lyndon B Johnson responded by saying that everyone should have the right to vote and shortly after this, the Voting Rights Act was passed. Johnson also sent the National Guard to protect the activists as they completed the march later. The national spotlight from the media coverage in Selma put lots of pressure on the government to act and fix the situation in Selma and also the bigger national issue of voting equality. Martin Luther King Jr. saw how effective nonviolent protesting could be from this. In Selma the protestors never became violent, instead they decided to march to raise awareness on the issue. The marchers were not doing anything wrong but were met by violent beatings from the police. The brutality was impossible to ignore, and because of the media coverage nearly everyone saw what was happening. Martin Luther King witnessed the effectiveness that  nonviolent protests could produce and this experience affected the way he thought activists should protest. He understood that if African American rights activists were to go around violently protesting and lashing out at white people then the activists message would be ignored and the violence the protesters were causing would be focused on instead. 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.( King 284)" 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. Events in the United States such as Selma, and Rosa Parks showed King firsthand what and how inequality feels. He was apart of the Civil Rights movement and knew first hand the inequality between the quality of life between African Americans and whites. These experiences did not  make him focus solely on just the United States' problems, 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 those in power were not fond of the idea of having to share it. So they used their power to prevent African Americans from cutting into the power and wealth they had. Examples of this could be seen all of the world during this time period, one such example was apartheid in South Africa. In South Africa white people made up a small percent of the population, but completely controlled the country and they used this power to take away most rights for blacks. Besides on a national scale this concept can be seen on a global scale, but  instead of white people controlling a nation, a few powerful nations control the World. The top economic nations in the world, also known as the core, control most of the global market and with this power they control most of the world. The concentration of wealth in the top few nations and the unwillingness to share it results in very poor periphery nations or third world countries. These third world countries do not have the power to propel and advance their economic standing in the world because of the greed in the core  In both global and national 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. King wanted to point out to society the global inequality in the world and how the problem could be solved. He understood that the core was not going to give away all of it's power to create global equality but wanted people to understand how thinking on a global scale would help the world.

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 global lack of vision from society 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. Prior to 1865, when slavery was still well and alive African Americans were treated like they were property and  not people. Plantation owners exploited this and forced the slaves to work endlessly while not earning any money. It did not make much economic sense for plantations to not exploit slave labor.Greed clouded the South's vision of how equality should work, if the plantation owners were not concerned with making maximum profits then the lives of African Americans during this time would have been vastly improved . King talked about apartheid in South Africa in "The World House", he said, " We (The United States) have been notoriously silent about the more than 700 million dollars of American capital which props up the system of apartheid, not to mention the billions of dollars in trade and the military alliances which are maintained under the pretext of fighting communism in Africa ( King 288). King said this to show how greed in the core prevents and makes it harder for oppressed people to get the help they need. The money the U.S gave South Africa could have been easily used to help end apartheid but because the U.S was making profit  from apartheid  it was supported. Another example of lack of vision in the world are the powerful transnational companies. 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. Selma and Lyndon B Johnson's response to Selma taught King that a rational nonviolent form of protest is powerful. It also taught him that presenting information through media and letting the people see it and understand it would educate society and help his cause. In "The World House" he presents the clear and rational idea that if people think about the world as a whole instead of thinking individually or nationally then the world would be a better place. 

Besides the distribution of wealth that leads to poverty, there are lots of other ways countries are being 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 people in the core 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. King experienced the hardships of inequality and after making great strides in the civil right's movement in America, he decided to shift his focus to the world as a whole. 

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.

