Remarks on MLK, Jr. Day 2011

During the 2011 MLK Jr. Day celebration, the Peace Resource Center and the Greater Bennington Interfaith Council co-hosted a conversation on marginalization and the beloved community.  Rabbi Joshua Boettiger shared reflections on marginalization followed by the remarks of First Baptist's Coordinating Minister the Rev. Jerrod Hugenot, who offered the following overview of King's use of the phrase "the beloved community":

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Exploring the idea of “the beloved community”, I note that to understand this concept, one could spend a great deal of time tracing the biblical, theological and philosophical influences on King’s thinking.  Oddly enough, King himself did not give a “textbook” definition, preferring to speak of the concept of “the beloved community” in the midst of his sermons and speeches as he addressed matters at hand.  There was some fluidity to his concept, yet in short, the beloved community became King’s “shorthand” for a greater vision for the deeply divided and fractured communities and the nation, where relationships matter deeply and difference is honored unreservedly.  Creating the beloved community “will be done by rejecting the racism, materialism, and violence that has characterized Western civilization and especially by working toward a world of brotherhood, cooperation, and peace.”  (King, early 1966)

King grew up aware of the oppressive pressures and the invisibility imposed upon him by a majority disinterested in being questioned for its habits or beliefs.    King’s first realization of a contrary witness, the “beloved community”, came from his upbringing in the Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Altanta, where his father, MLK, JR., served as long-time minister. 

One of King’s many biographers Richard Lischer suggests that the church of King’s boyhood experiences modeled an alternative witness:

In this church everybody could be ‘somebody.  Those of humble occupation could claim the dignity and positions of leadership that were denied them in a white society.  In the black church, a barber or a redcap [conductor] could become an elder; a seamstress might lead the Woman’s Missionary Union….[Preaching was a shared task: preacher and congregation in dialogue.]  The Word became the achievement of the group.”—Richard Lischer, The Preacher King, Oxford University Press)

Such a “beloved community” planted seeds for King’s later career.  As King spoke to activists, to sanitation workers on strike, to a nation embroiled in Vietnam, to people seeking a non-violent alternative to the turbulent violence of the 1960s, King kept referencing a vision that would be kept distant only by our inaction, our refusal to seek justice.  In 1956, King spoke of

“A new world in which men will live together as brothers; a world in which men will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; a world in which men will no longer take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes; a world in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.”—King, Address to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change (1956)

The “beloved community” is in brief what King knows will take struggle and hardship to achieve, yet moving toward a community where no persons are left in the invisibility of marginalization and oppression, where human dignity and worth is not considered optional, is well worth the effort. 

To do anything less would be to allow unjust systems remain in place and persons consigned to a spiral of violence and a steep ladder of privilege that few can climb.  In his aptly titled 1967 book “Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?”, King observes, “All life is interrelated. The agony of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly".

Exploring King’s ‘beloved community,' we realize we have a choice how we live in community with one another. We can choose poorly or wisely. Unfortunately such conversations are often lost in the civility-challenged discourse of the day.  The question inevitably arises about King if he were to be still alive today.  Would he would continue to ponder when his dream for this country will see fulfillment? We have come far, yet there are still persons who live with basic human needs going unmet.

King would be likely unsurprised that we are not completely there yet, though he would ask some hard questions, not necessarily of society but of those who claim his legacy and witness.  Have we continued to keep to our own commitments to bring about the beloved community?  Have we perhaps grown cool to the thought of his vision?  King offers no easy answers, yet when he spells out the “end results” of such efforts, can we argue that this future is not worth working toward?  He offers:

When the years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live, men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization, because these humble children of God were willing to ‘suffer for righteousness’ sake.’”—From King’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech