MLK Jr. Taught Us that Justice Requires Building Community

Deborah Archer,Time -   To [Dr. King], the beloved community was never simply about restraining harm or condemning injustice after the fact. It was about constructing the social, economic, and political conditions that make equality durable—conditions that allow people not merely to coexist, but to live together with mutual concern and shared fate. The work of justice, as King envisioned it, was fundamentally constructive.

Building justice means asking different questions. Not just: Was there discrimination? But: What systems are producing these outcomes? Who benefits from their design? Who bears the costs? And what would it take to redesign them so that communities can flourish rather than fracture?

It also requires expanding our understanding of harm. Inequality is often experienced collectively. When a neighborhood loses affordable housing, a community loses stability. When public investment bypasses certain areas, residents lose access to opportunity. When displacement erodes social networks, people lose the support systems that make daily life possible. These are community-level injuries, and they demand community-centered solutions.

This approach is not a departure from our history. It is a continuation of it. In each of the nation’s great moments of progress, justice advanced not from restraint alone, but from design—reconstruction paired the end of slavery with schools; voting protections paired with federal enforcement. The New Deal combined regulation with social insurance and public investment. The civil rights movement demanded not only the end of segregation, but access to jobs, housing, and political power. In each case, equality became more durable because it was built into the structures of daily life.

Today, as courts narrow the meaning of equality and policymakers retreat from race-conscious remedies, we face a choice. In recent decisions, the Supreme Court has rejected race-conscious admissions in the name of formal neutrality, raised the bar for proving racially discriminatory gerrymandering, and narrowed the ability of voters to challenge practices that deny meaningful access to the ballot. Together, these rulings reflect a constricted vision of rights—one that treats inequality as legally irrelevant so long as it is produced by ostensibly neutral rules. We can continue to rely exclusively on tools designed to stop yesterday’s harms. Or we can pair those tools with a more ambitious project: building justice into the systems that shape where people live, how communities function, and who gets to belong. 

Justice is not only a shield we raise when harm occurs. It is a blueprint for the beloved community we are trying to create. On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the question is not whether we honor Dr. King’s words. It is whether we are ready to build the beloved community he envisioned—one in which dignity, belonging, and opportunity are not aspirational ideals, but lived realities.  More