Beloved Community

The Beloved Community is a place of dignity, love, respect, justice and abundance for all. The road to the Beloved Community is through nonviolence. Since our understanding of nonviolence is still evolving, we make the road by walking. We experiment with truth, which is what this toolkit is about. 

Beloved Community was used by civil rights activists as the vision of a nonviolent society, one in which problems and conflicts exist, but are resolved peacefully and without bitterness. It is based on the scientific and moral awareness that we are all members of one human family. As Dr. King taught: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” He further observed: ““The aftermath of nonviolence is the Beloved Community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”

“Consider those two words,” John Lewis asked. “Beloved means not hateful, not violent, not uncaring, not unkind. And Community means not separated, not polarized, not locked in struggle.” In all our encounters, we conduct ourselves with dignity and self-respect.  When they go low, we go high.

We can live today as if the Beloved Community is here. John Lewis wrote: “You live as if you’re already there, that you’re already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there.”   

Reconciliation is a vital component of the Beloved Community as Mrs. Coretta Scott King shared: “In the Beloved Community, caring and compassion drive political policies that support the worldwide elimination of poverty and hunger and all forms of bigotry and violence.  The Beloved Community is a state of heart and mind, a spirit of hope and goodwill that transcends all boundaries and barriers and embraces all creation.  At its core, the Beloved Community is an engine of reconciliation.”