How I Abolished Bigotry and Created the Beloved Community

Martin Luther King Jr.

At first glance, it was rather difficult just trying to identify my true feelings. They seemed so foreign to me at the time. Each emotion had become clearly alienated from the other. This was so very strange. I had never felt that way before. All of a sudden, while driving through the heart of the Club District, down Peachtree Street and into the lively psychedelic midst of an Atlanta party-time Friday night atmosphere, it finally came to me. This was the end of my very first day on my brand new job, in a city that I had only come to relocate to just a few weeks earlier. Now, I was suffering from culture shock. One moment, I was managing a highly professional well-respected brigade, as Chef d' Cuisine of a Michelin Star-rated kitchen in New York City; and now I had moved to a southern metropolis only to immediately take over the reins of one of it's busiest restaurants. Talk about high expectations. Even in the face of their new leader, this was a crew that bickered and fought all day long.

There was no discipline whatsoever. Morale was dangerously low, and the employees seemed to spend each and every shift doing just about anything that they pleased. Servers often cursed at cooks out loud; usually as a means of rebuking some crude sexual advance. Stewards frequently demanded respect, and the Guarde Manger seemed to glare at everyone with a menacing eye as if saying. "Don't any of you dare come back here." This was terrible, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this behavior had to be causing quite a drain upon the entire brand. Never had I experienced such a collective lack of basic customer service skills. It truly shocked me to witness this in the very city that Dr. King would come to conceive of his ultimate dream of The Beloved Community (Washington 245-254). Nonetheless, every successful restaurateur ultimately comes to realize that customer service actually begins in the Back of the House. This is to say that profit and loss can essentially be measured by the level of professionalism displayed amongst the staff.

The painful headache that had begun to plague me as I left work that very first night feeling almost like a broken man, had gradually faded away by the time that I got back home. There I sat, resting on my porch, brainstorming, agonizing, something had to give. This kind of reckless and unprofessional behavior had to change. This lack of discipline and training had an inconspicuous cultural factor as well. Over the last 40 years, American corporations had become largely successful in legally desegregating the workplace. However, American society has been conspicuously absent of a truly unifying spirit of selfless integration. Nonetheless, suddenly, I had a plan. With the proper training any group of workers can be molded into an efficient and highly motivated team.

First, I had to convince each employee that their co-workers were actually the first customers that they would encounter on a daily basis; and thus upon this interaction much of their job performance and salary was to be measured and judged. Secondly, the entire culture would have to change, and there could no longer be any differentiating between the Front and the Back of the House. Everyone would be expected to be on their utmost professional behavior at all times; no matter whom they were interacting with. Sexual harassment had to be treated seriously. The whole restaurant needed to see itself as one united team, with one solid mission in mind. Surly, the radio had to go. Lastly, I would really need to enlist the strongest leaders on the staff to buy into my vision by convincing them that the situation was dire enough to ultimately cost everyone their job.

That night, as the stars begin tumbling into the pre-dawn hours, I spent myself in quiet contemplation lying on a hammock outdoors, with a fine Chilean Shiraz, and my old dusty dog-eared out of print copy of Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community; Dr. King's very last book.

Although often terribly neglected even in the most scholarly commentary, this deeply passionate sermon actually sums up his conclusions after a 12 year career experimenting with creative nonviolence. King often spoke of the three forms of love: Eros - romantic or sexual love, Philo - friendship or brotherly love as in Philadelphia, and Agape - self sacrifice or selfless and unconditional love. Without a doubt, to him agape was the most superior the three. King's greatest desire was to create the Beloved Community; a society that put humanism above materialism, and egalitarianism above bias. This is what he actually hoped for our world after the enormous struggles of the sixties were over. It is that kind of moral heavy-lifting in the spirit of tolerance that E. M. Forester had eluded would be "needed after the war" (Two Cheers 44-47).

This I now saw as my mission on the job. Somehow I had to get these employees to put professionalism above their own prejudices, and to consider whether they were satisfying the specifications of our brand, rather than whether or not someone they worked with was gay or straight, black or white, ghetto or decidedly civilized enough. Later, I would come to discover just how difficult this would actually become in a city as unique as Atlanta; where black upon black class warfare had become largely compounded since that fateful episode during the years of World War Two (Ferguson 43-80). How strange it would appear that in Atlanta, the most active ingredients of racial bigotry no longer required a white provocateur.

This was my greatest challenge; to mold the brigade of the future out of the woeful detritus of the past. King would not live long enough to Sheppard his dream into a reality. However, during these days of moral uncertainty, King's Tomb has become one of the world's most traveled destinations. From every corner of the globe, the entire world has found itself on a pilgrimage in search of a universal symbol of spiritual probity and agape love. They travel from lands often as distant from one another as they are diverse. Yet, altogether they seem have found a common cause. It is here with this collective sense of duty, that we shall discover the Beloved Community.