Black Technological Thought in the Civil Rights Era: Deciphering Martin Luther King Jr.'s Insights

This paper focuses on the active involvement of Black civil rights leaders in decoding the meaning of societal and technological progress as it related to race relations during that period. Through a method of deciphering, I employ a close reading of the influential civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.'s text, “The World House,” the last chapter of his book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? , first published posthumously in 1967. In particular, I examine how King analyzes the role of technology in global political economies through a racial capitalist lens. In doing so, I integrate King's thought with the work of scholars who study racial capitalism to elucidate how King's analysis of technological progress both aligns with and departs from their work. Analyzing these facets of Black thought on technology during the civil rights era enables us to understand the various ways in which technology was central to delineating the relational dynamics between the social constructions of racial and technological progress.