The vision, given its enduring American articulation by Martin Luther King Jr., of a society reconciled across the lines of race, class, and creed — not merely tolerant or peaceable but bound by active love (agape), economic justice, and the practical refusal of every form of dehumanization. The phrase predates King — it was used by the early-20th-century American philosopher Josiah Royce — but King made it the regulative ideal of the civil-rights movement, the goal in light of which both segregation and segregation-by-other-means stand condemned, and the standard against which the movement's tactical choices were to be judged.
Three features mark the concept as King uses it. First, it is positive: the goal is not the absence of overt conflict but the presence of just relations, what King called the difference between "negative peace" (the absence of tension) and "positive peace" (the presence of justice). Second, it is inclusive of the adversary: the segregationist too is a member of the community to be reconciled, which is why Nonviolence is the proper means — violence forecloses the reconciliation that is the goal. Third, it is material: King insisted, especially in the last years of his life, that the beloved community required economic transformation — the Poor People's Campaign, the Memphis sanitation strike — and not only the dismantling of legal segregation.
The concept has a quieter life in subsequent American thought. bell hooks's writing on love as political practice draws on it explicitly. The Sermon-on-the-Mount tradition of Dorothy Day and Howard Thurman is its theological hinterland. Critics have asked whether the ideal demands too much of the wronged — whether the burden of reconciliation falls disproportionately on those with least to forgive. King's own answer was that beloved community is not cheap: it costs the wronged everything, but the alternatives cost more.