Just like how simply reading Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech "The World House" will not give you a complete understanding of the civil rights movement as a whole, an understanding of the movement itself can result in an entirely new interpretation and understanding of the speech.  Simply comparing the speech to the ideals of other civil rights leaders, and considering the events occurring at the time of this speech, will shed new light on it.  In fact, such an analysis can reveal how there was political tension and rivalry between members of the movement, as well as current events, played important roles in the speech.

The civil rights movement was far from an unified movement towards equality among the races; the various leaders of the movement, as well as their followers had wildly different opinions about how to achieve the movement's goals and even what those goals were.  In fact, one of the major of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X, was constantly disagreed with King's ideals.  Malcolm X argued in a speech he made three years earlier that Whites and African-Americans should live in separate communities ("Message to the Grassroots" 3).  On the other hand, King seems to use his speech to counter Malcolm X's ideals at several points, starting with how he states that everyone in the world is now effectively living in "a great 'world house,'" due to how technology has effectively made the world smaller, and how this means we, as a species, all have to "live with each other in peace" (King 284).  King also apparently responds to Malcolm X's aggressive ideology in a large portion of his speech where he argues that violence and wars only create more issues, more violence, and more hate.  In other words, King indirectly accuses Malcolm X's calls for a violent revolution of being not only misguided, but counterproductive as well (King 292   295).  In fact, King's opposition towards violent and militaristic attempts to change the world, such as Malcolm X's variation of the civil rights movement, is shown by the quote "So when in this day I see the leaders of nations again talking peace while preparing for war, I take fearful pause" (King 294).  Throughout King's speech "The World House," he encourages the peaceful pursuit of equality, as well as peace itself, and for unity to exist not just among the members of certain ethnicities, but among all people regardless of heritage.  These points can be thought of as an indirect argument against Malcolm X's beliefs, showing how the political tension between King and Malcolm X shaped King's own speech by forcing King to defend his own views.

Current events besides the rivalry between King and Malcolm X also played a role in King's speech. Throughout the first section of the speech, King references various scientific achievements from the previous couple of decades that illustrate how the world is effectively shrinking to the point where we are all interconnected to each other and "can never again live apart" (King 284).  In other words, King uses examples of technology that were still developing rapidly at the time such as massive bridges, telephones, and passenger planes, in order to illustrate how "close" we are to the rest of the people in the world and how this will force us to cooperate because we all share the relatively tight confines of the "World House" (King 284).  However, this is not the only example of how current events helped shape his speech; for example, King uses the apartheid system in South Africa which was a particularly brutal form of legalized racism and segregation at the time to show how the issue of racism is a global issue.  It shapes and supports the messages of the speech by further reinforcing how, since Great Britain and the United States are helping fund this system, that the problem of racism is an internationally connected problem and how Great Britain and the U.S., despite supposedly being "moral bastions of our Western world," are being hypocritical by condemning oppression (King 289).  Basically, the apartheid system is a great example of how King used a current event to reinforce his argument.  King also extensively uses one of the biggest subjects of the time, the Cold War, to expand on his message.  Various parts of the Cold War are used at different points in the speech for a variety of different purposes.  For example, the Vietnam War is used by King when discussing how racism, and its "more sophisticate form" of neocolonialism only leads to violence and hatred that hurts everyone by pointing out how the dangerous hatred for the whole Western World that led to what was an ongoing war in Vietnam began after it was exploited as a colony of France (King 289).  It served as a powerful example of how hatred only leads to more hatred and violence because it was a major issue dividing the country and many Americans were closely connected to in one way or another.  The Cold War as a whole was also used by King to point out how communism, which was greatly feared by the public at the time, grows by convincing those who are oppressed that they can escape oppression through communism.  In other words, King explains that oppression leads to the violent revolutions and the large number of countries accepting communism, which enhances his depiction of racism as evil by tapping into the widespread belief in the evil nature of communism and also acts as encouragement to audience to end racism in order to halt the nearly universally feared spread of communism (King 289).  Finally, the Cold War plays an important role in the speech yet again by demonstrating the uselessness of violence because King points out how, even though the U.S. and Russia want to limited the spread of each other's ideals, the weapons from that time period make it so that even a "so-called limited war" result in massive amounts of suffering and conflict encouraging hatred with little to no gain for either side (King 289).  This part of the message taps into the powerful memories of the Korean War which took place a decade before the speech was made and was fought for several years to a standstill practically where the borders were at the start of the war.  Perhaps even more powerfully, it would have called the audience's attention to the ongoing Vietnam War which was already a quagmire that only hindered the pursuit of peace in the eyes of many Americans.  King also mentioned that trying to resolve our differences through wars becoming an even greater threat not only to peace, but humanity itself.  He quoted the recent President John F. Kennedy by saying "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind" and brought up how, given the existence of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear warhead containing intercontinental ballistic missiles in particular, trying to resolve conflicts through violent means is dangerous and outdated (King 294).  The fear that a disagreement between the U.S. and Russia could spark a nuclear war that would practically send humanity back to the Stone Age was a very real fear during the Cold War and King taps into that fear to emphasize his belief that war can no longer serve any purpose because, due to technological advances, it has become so deadly that the benefits of being able to stop an "evil force" from spreading were now outweighed by their destructive potential (King 294).  In short, King uses several current events to help his message be more relatable to his audience and act as evidence to support his arguments; therefore, current events were used as critical pieces of evidence that fit the 1960s audience he was speaking to and allowed the speech to take shape.

All in all, by simply looking at the point in history when Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech "The World House" was made, particularly the ideological differences between King and Malcolm X and the events unfolding across the world at that time, can reveal a significant amount of information regarding how the speech was put together.  Although those two points are by no means the only critical pieces of the speech, both played a significant role in getting across the message's major points across to the audience and are even partially responsible for the creation of these points to begin with.  Speeches, like people, are influenced and shaped partially by their environment.

