Martin Luther King’s Vision of the Beloved Community Justice for Everyone After the March to Montgomery in the spring of 1966, several thousand marchers were delayed at the airport because their planes were late. As King tells it, he was deeply impressed by the heterogeneity yet the obvious unity of the crowd: As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood [Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper & Row, 1967)’ p. 9] In King’s view, the interrelatedness of human existence means that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." He believed that denial of constitutional rights to anyone potentially violates the rights of all. It is the entire national community that is the victim of electric cattle prods and biting police dogs. Discrimination against 10 per cent of our population weakens the whole social fabric. Race and poverty are not merely sectional problems but American problems. It follows that the liberation of black people will also mean the emancipation of white people. King took seriously the indivisibility of human existence. "In a real sense," he wrote, "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" (ibid., p. 181). His approach to human existence led King to believe that in seeking to eliminate racial injustice, the civil rights movement was making a far larger contribution to the national life. Integration is usually associated solely with the struggle for racial equality, but King conceived of it in a much broader way. He envisioned a future society in which persons would not be malformed as a result of racial hatred or economic exploitation. That is, King was not concerned about justice for blacks as opposed to justice for whites; he was concerned about justice for everyone. And he made perfectly clear what he meant by that: Let us be dissatisfied until rat-infested, vermin-filled slums will be a thing of a dark past and every family will have a decent sanitary house in which to live. Let us be dissatisfied until the empty stomachs of Mississippi are filled and the idle industries of Appalachia are revitalized. . . . Let us be dissatisfied until our brothers of the Third World of Asia, Africa and Latin America will no longer be the victims of imperialist exploitation, but will be lifted from the long night of poverty, illiteracy and disease ["Honoring Dr. Du Bois," in Freedomways, VIII, s (Spring 1968), pp. 110-111]. Plainly, King’s vision of justice included all the world’s poor -- blacks, whites, browns and reds: North and South Americans, Africans, Asians and Europeans. Economic justice, he held, is a right of the entire human race. He was aware too that securing this right for all would require elimination of the structures of economic injustice characteristic of capitalism.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 02:56:00 +0000
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