Staging the US Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. in America's Berlin, 1964

Riding the momentum of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and amidst FBI surveillance, Martin Luther King Jr. visited divided Berlin in September 1964. West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt invited King to appear at the 1964 Berlin Cultural Festival. Planned as an exploration of African and African American influences on European and American art, West Berlin leaders hoped the festival would contribute towards long-term efforts to maintain the city’s constructed identity as an “outpost of democracy,” and compel Africans and African Americans to endorse the city as a symbolic bulwark against oppression everywhere. While Brandt and his cultural advisor Nicolas Nabokov sought King’s presence at the festival’s opening ceremony to lend credibility to West Berlin's Cold War narrative, King transformed the invitation into a strategic platform for his own rhetorical advocacy. This essay argues that by accepting Brandt's invitation and rhetorically framing his calls for US federal enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, warnings against Republican Senator Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign, and critiques of American segregation within Berlin—a space of military occupation, political confrontation, physical division, and cultural connection—Dr. King used the divided city as a stage for the movement’s advocacy. This essay explores how Dr. King acted as a non-state foreign policy actor and negotiated between East and West Germany’s Cold War identities and the Global Cold War.