The Beloved Community

The immediate aim of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956 was the integration of seating on city buses. Black and white citizens ought to be able to sit wherever on the bus there was seating. The status quo was that whites sat near the front of the bus. Blacks sat at the back of the bus. If all the front seats had been taken when a white person joined the bus, a black person in the seat nearest the white section had to relinquish their seat. After a year's struggle (and many years before), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregating buses. The boycott was a great victory; progress was made in social justice, and the immediate goal was met, if not exceeded by the Supreme Court decision.

However, the goal of bus integration—though not to be diminished in its place in the civil rights movement—was a small episode in a far greater narrative. In December 1956, at a gathering of the Montgomery Improvement Association to celebrate the Supreme Court decision, Martin Luther King Jr. told his audience that the goal of the bus boycott was the “creation of the beloved community” (cited in Marsh 2005 , 1). Bus integration was but a small sign pointing to a grander vista. To focus on the detail would be to miss the overall picture. “Beloved community,” as King termed the panorama, became a motif underlying all of his later work. He said in 1958, “The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community” (Washington 1986, 12), and elsewhere in the same year, “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness” (Ibid., 18).

What did King mean by the “beloved community”? He does not give us an exact definition, but in context the beloved community means something like a completely integrated society, a community where everyone counts simply by virtue of their humanity, and a community characterized by love and justice. It was an ineluctably social vision, for King was not an individualist.