Dr. King: Shaping a Community and a Nation
Today, we remember and celebrate the enduring legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His was a steadfast, powerful voice for the Beloved Community—one characterized by mutual respect, understanding, and cooperation among all people, regardless of their backgrounds. He envisioned a community that held values of dignity, justice, and belonging for all.
Like a deafening refrain, historians and political commentators are presaging that we are at a pivotal point—a seminal place to decide who we are and what we value as a democratic society.
The quotes herein are from Dr. King’s speech “The Birth of a New Age,” which he gave on August 11, 1956 at the Fiftieth Anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha in Buffalo. Dr. King received the Alpha Award of Honor for “Christian leadership in the cause of first-class citizenship for all mankind.”
The first thing is this: we must rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns, with a broader concern for all humanity.
In this moment of strife, division, and turmoil, communities like Minneapolis are battling for their core values and very freedoms. Community activists, volunteers, and neighbors are joining forces to support each other: being present and vocal at ICE raids, signaling ICE arrival with shrill whistles, monitoring schools to protect children, and making sure that families who fear leaving their homes have groceries. It is this kind of resilience and perseverance that was exhibited by Dr. King and those who took up the fight for civil rights.
What does shaping our community, our nation, look like in this tenuous moment?
Dr. King said:
But whenever there is anything new there are new responsibilities. As we think of this coming new world we must think of the challenge that we confront and the new responsibilities that stand before us. We must prepare to live in a new world.
Civil rights leaders and activists understood this mindset. In the tribute to Dr. King, CBS Sunday Morning created a compelling historical storyline of the civil rights movement. Florida Senator Arthenia Joyner was one of the activists who participated in the Woolworth counter sit-in. Referring to that moment, she said, “There are things that are bigger than fear.” Dr. King said,
But far from representing retrogression or tragic hopelessness, the present tension represents the necessary pains that accompany the birth of anything new. It is both historically and biologically true that there can be no birth or growth without birth and growing pains. Wherever there is the emergence of the new and the fading of the old, that is historically true and so the tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new world is being born and an old world is passing away.
Theaster Gates
Beloved Community in Action
In that same CBS Sunday Morning program, social practice installation artist and professor Theaster Gates was interviewed. His work and perspective embodies aspects of the Beloved Community in action. Trained in urban planning and Japanese ceramics, Gates is the founder and artist director of the Rebuild Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on cultural-driven redevelopment and affordable space initiatives in under-resourced communities in Chicago. To the tune of $100 million, Gates has restored and converted abandoned buildings into cultural institutions with archival collections centered in African-American history. The buildings became gathering places for the community and for making connections—not just between neighbors, but also between the buildings. Thinking beyond an individual project, Gates feels that to create an economic core it’s important to understand the relationship between businesses and institutions. By asking “What’s the relationship between an old house, a local school, and a small bodega,” Gates intentionally curates the cultural landscape with and for the community.
Following his curiosities and reimagining is how Gates described getting “from dysfunction to function; from blight to beauty; and from discord to community.” Referring to the reshaping of cities, Gates says, “The artistic imagination can solve any problem on earth.”
Finally, so that a Beloved Community can take shape, Dr. King spoke about the quality and character of leadership needed:
In order to do this job we have got to have more dedicated, consecrated, intelligent and sincere leadership. This is a tense period through which we are passing, this period of transition and there is a need all over the nation for leaders to carry on. Leaders who can somehow sympathize with and calm us and at the same time have a positive quality. We have got to have leaders of this sort who will stand by courageously and yet not run off with emotion. We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the pressing urgencies of the great cause of freedom. God give us leaders. A time like this demands great leaders. Leaders whom the fog of life cannot chill, men whom the lust of office cannot buy.
With deep reverence and gratitude, Dr. King.
