Secular and Spiritual Salvation in 1961 Birmingham, Alabama: Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community as Imagined in Vicki Covington’s The Last Hotel for Women

This essay examines the ways in which Vicki Covington’s 1996 novel The Last Hotel for Women thematizes Martin Luther King, Jr.’s notion of the “Beloved Community,” a social and religious ideal that shaped the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. The novel is set in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1961, when the Freedom Riders were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan. Covington’s thematic concerns overlap with King’s in two areas: the desirability of integration, and the end goals of reconciliation and redemption. The novel draws parallels between the social redemption offered by the Movement and the spiritual redemption offered by Christianity.