Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is celebrated in over one hundred countries, yet his international influence has received little attention. That King devoted his life to the civil and human rights struggle in the United States is well known; less well known, however, is that his concern for social justice stretched well beyond the borders of this country.

It was in fact King's ideal of the beloved community - an inclusive and interracial society epitomized by freedom and justice for all - that transformed his national insight into a global vision. And it was this global vision that inspired King, and the heirs of his legacy, to play a profound role in South Africa's liberation from apartheid.

.

Meticulously drawing on fugitive archival material, private correspondence, interviews, sermons, public speeches, and published works, Vanderbilt's Lewis V. Baldwin carefully traces the relationship between King's life and thought and that of great South African leaders such as Chief Albert J. Luthuli, Steve Biko, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Allan Boesak, and Desmond Tutu.

The author recounts King's responses to the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as his impact on anti-apartheid activists and movements in and outside South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s - including the conflict between King's legacy of nonviolence and the Black Consciousness Movement that swept through Africa as colonialism fell.