Learn & Build with Beloved Longmont
Building the Beloved Community doesn’t happen through good intentions alone. It happens when people choose to show up, learn, serve, and connect. Every conversation, every volunteer hour, and every new relationship helps create a stronger, more welcoming Longmont where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
Whether you’re just beginning to explore Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the Beloved Community or you’re looking for meaningful ways to deepen your involvement, there’s a place for you. Attend an event, volunteer alongside your neighbors, join a community conversation, or continue your learning through books, videos, podcasts, and other resources. Every action, big or small, contributes to a culture of belonging, compassion, and shared purpose.
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Watch, Listen & Learn*
Stories That Ask Us to Look, Listen, and Act
What does it mean to understand where we come from…and to consider where we go from here?
This collection of films, documentaries, and community voices invites us into that conversation. Across different decades, perspectives, and forms of storytelling, these videos explore the history of racial justice in America, the systems that have shaped our communities, and the people who have challenged those systems through courage, persistence, creativity, and collective action.
*Submit suggestions for these lists by emailing Julie at julie@belovedlongmont.org.
Recommended Reading List
by Martin Luther King Jr.
A collection of Dr. King’s sermons and essays that call us to love at eh heart of justice and the soul of community.
by Clint Smith
A powerful exploration of America’s history of slavery; and how understanding that history is essential to building a more just future.
by Dorothy F. Cotton
An inspiring account of grassroots empowerment and the power of education in the fight for freedom and dignity.
by Howard Thurman
A spiritual classic that invites us to follow a Jesus who stands with the oppressed and calls us to create a world where all are fully human.
by James M. Lawson, Jr.
Timeless lessons from a movement leader on the strategy and spirit of nonviolence in transforming unjust systems.
by Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King’s firsthand account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a turning point in the modern civil rights movement.
by Charles Marsh and John M. Perkins
A bold invitation to join God’s work of justice through community, reconciliation, and transformation.
by Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King’s prophetic words on the choices before us and the urgent need to build the Beloved Community.
by Bryan Stevenson
A true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to end mass incarceration in America.
by Layla Saad
Teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
by Ibram X. Kendi
Antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America–but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other.
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”
by Richard Rothstein
Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation
by Matthew Desmond
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of 21st-century America’s most devastating problems.
by Michelle Alexander
“Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.”
by Austin Channing Brown
I’m Still Here is an illuminating look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God’s ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness–if we let it–can save us all.
by RJemar Tisby
Jemar Tisby takes us back to the root of this injustice in the American church, highlighting the cultural and institutional tables we have to flip in order to bring about progress between black and white people.
by Isabel Wilkerson
Through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
