Establishing Martin Luther King's Beloved Community for the Education of Black Youth

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to offer a vision of what educational communities could look like based on the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a vision that is both substantive in content yet flexible in its application to the diverse contexts of American schooling; a vision that finds its roots in King's personalistic theology (Burrow, 2006) and becomes fully captured in his idea of the Beloved Community. As Smith and Zepp (1998) argued a number of years ago, “The vision of the Beloved Community was the organizing principle of all of King's thought and activity” (p. 129). This paper focuses on the three principles that form the core of King's position (King, 1963). The first principle that King argued had to be present in a Beloved Community was “a recognition of the sacredness of human personality” (p. 118). This position essentially maintains that there is a theological basis for “the dignity and worth of all human personality” (Smith, 1981) and, consequently, that all people have something to contribute. The second principle of the Beloved Community is to establish an environment of freedom (King, 1963). As King wrote, “A denial of freedom to an individual is a denial of life itself” (p. 118). The final principle that the essay will explore is “the recognition of the solidarity of the human family” (p. 121). This position essentially contends that everyone is interrelated and that unless we all recognize our mutual interdependence, we will continue to fracture and divide along lines of race, gender, religion, and social class.