A few critical incidents in Korea helped push the domestic movement in a more combative direction, and Korea thus made an important but long-overlooked contribution to the tone and the vision of the African-American struggle for equal rights.
Mitchell Lerner is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, where he also serves as director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the associate director of the East Asia Studies Center. Lerner’s most recent book is the Cold War at Home and Abroad: Domestic Politics and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1945 (2018). Lerner is associate editor of the Journal of American–East Asian Relations.