Building the Beloved Community

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was never more of a moral warrior, and never more deeply committed to nonviolence, than when he was approaching the end of his life. He did not see these stances as inconsistent, but as prerequisites for each other. Some claimed that nonviolence died with Dr. King. Quite the contrary. In the United States and around the world, from Eastern Europe to the Philippines to South Africa, nonviolent direct action flexed its muscle during the last third of the twentieth century.¹

King was convinced that assertive nonviolent action, which he liked to call soul force, was not only more ethical than violence but more effective, especially long-term. He did not think that violent methods had ever been truly effective, whether in the Civil War, which left its legacy of wretched white supremacy, in global warfare, or in ghetto riots. In just six decades since its “invention” by Gandhi in 1906, mass nonviolent action in King’s view had proven more successful than six millennia of human violence. This was partly because it did not leave bitterness behind to haunt future generations. It stymied the law of the multiplication of evil. He aspired to create the moral equivalent of civil war, whose just reconciliation would not give lie to Lincoln’s malice toward none, charity for all.

King believed that soul force—the synthesis of justice and compassion, of faith and understanding, of social and personal rebirth—was rooted in ancient wisdom but geared to the future of human evolution. Soul force required the fire of faith and moral passion not only to break down the walls of inhumanity, but to forge the new person: a free person whose emotional capacity would be as mature as her intellect, whose mental and emotional being, rather than sabotaging each other, would coalesce into a more enlightened creature who more truly reflected the image of God. Soul force would deliver as well the beloved community, knit together by compassionate understanding, heartfelt communication, bonds of human intimacy.

But however strong his faith, King had grave concerns about what was to come. He believed that the Poor People’s Campaign—he somehow knew it was to be his last—would demonstrate whether creative nonviolent action would prove to be the dominant instrument of social change for the future.² Or, would it be thrust aside by armed struggle on one side, and people’s anomie and “timid supplication” on the other?

Let us transplant King’s anguish onto the uncertain terrain of our new century. Will we inherit a future brokered by self-righteous terrorists, official or unofficial, and by masses of disempowered consumers alienated from the world and their own souls, terrified to their bones?

We who claim the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. must cling to the life raft of nonviolence, in word and deed, in passion and compassion, as determinedly as he did during the last years of his life.

The alternative is unspeakable.