Why We Can't Wait Read online

  WHY WE CAN’T WAIT

  MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  Beacon Press, Boston

  TO MY CHILDREN

  Yolanda—Martin III—Dexter—Bernice

  for whom I dream that one day soon

  they will no longer be judged by the color of

  their skin but by the content of their character

  I acknowledge with affection and gratitude

  the help of Hermine I. Popper, whose

  perception and intelligence enabled her to

  do a constructive and important editorial job.

  I am also grateful to Alfred Duckett for his efforts

  and suggestions in the early stages of my manuscript.

  Contents

  Introduction by Dorothy Cotton

  1964 Introduction by Martin Luther King, Jr.

  I: The Negro Revolution—Why 1963?

  II: The Sword That Heals

  III: Bull Connor’s Birmingham

  IV: New Day in Birmingham

  V: Letter from Birmingham Jail

  VI: Black and White Together

  VII: The Summer of Our Discontent

  VIII: The Days to Come

  Selected Bibliography

  Introduction

  In 1963, Birmingham was often called the most segregated city in America. Our freedom struggle there revealed how brutal and pervasive the segregation pattern was and how challenging and difficult this part of our journey would be. The more we demanded our rights as citizens, the more hatred and violence we encountered from segregationist public officials. Despite the intense opposition, however, hundreds of Birmingham citizens joined the struggle to bring about change. Marching for freedom and submitting to jailing became an ordinary daily event. But there came a time when the jails were full, even when police started to confine other arrested protesters in the local fairground.

  It was Good Friday, and there was a church full of people waiting to march for freedom with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leading them. Their objectives included the elimination of Birmingham’s rigid segregation. They wanted the right to vote. They wanted jobs and the ability to try on clothes in all the places where they shopped. They wanted public schools opened to all children without regard to the color of their skin. Even in the liquor stores African Americans were required to form a separate waiting line in order to be served. Still we continued to sing, “We would not let anything turn us around,” as one of our popular freedom songs intoned.

  With this backdrop, I was there when Martin faced his most poignant decision in the midst of the Birmingham struggle. The jails were full, and protestors were awaiting bail, but we were out of money. In room 30 of the A. G. Gaston Motel, there was a long and a very intense meeting that brought together local Birmingham civic leaders with Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.) team. All of us had responded to the call from the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the local civil rights leader who had invited Dr. King to Birmingham. With a church full of people waiting for Dr. King to lead another peaceful march through the downtown area, we had to determine. We had called a boycott to bring attention to the reason for our struggle, because we wanted the business community to understand the goals of our movement.

  In this book, Martin recalls his experience of heartfelt despair as he quietly listened to the heated arguments about whether he should concentrate on raising money that would be used to bail out the hundreds of people already incarcerated or should go to jail himself, as he had urged so many others to do just that—not only in Birmingham but in hotbeds of protest activity in other cities.

  I still cry as I read about the agony he felt as he listened to all of us in room 30. Most of us urged him to stay out of jail at this point because of the urgent need for bail money. Martin recalled that there were “twenty-four pairs of eyes” upon him. At that moment, he had “come face to face with himself” as leader. After all, he had encouraged people from across the community to accept suffering, to accept jailing. It would not be only the eyes of the people of Birmingham on him but the eyes and ears of people nationwide. He was “alone in that crowded room.”

  After enduring his silent agony, he communicated in no uncertain terms that he had made his decision. Without saying anything, he stood up and walked into the adjoining bedroom. When he reentered the parlor where we were gathered, he had put on his marching clothes. We could see that there was no longer a need to ponder his choices. Words could not have communicated more powerfully that he had made his decision. The debate was over.

  He later explained that he “could not encourage hundreds of people to make a stunning sacrifice and then excuse himself.” We stood, made a circle, and crossed and held hands, as was our custom, and sang “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of our movement. Some of us sang with tears in our eyes. It was a powerful moment.

  Martin’s decision to go to jail was a crucial turning point for the civil rights struggle. Although he was placed in solitary confinement, his spirit was lifted when his lawyers were finally allowed to visit him. Clarence Jones brought the encouraging news that Harry Belafonte had been able to raise fifty thousand dollars for bail bonds. Those of us who participated in that argument in room 30 of the Gaston Motel realized that Martin had made the right decision, both morally and tactically.

  While in jail Martin would write his most profound explanation of our nonviolent strategy. His now well-known “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was a response to a group of white Birmingham clergymen who severely criticized him as an outside agitator. Martin’s detailed defense can be summarized in the poetic line “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

  Soon the whole country and indeed the whole world would take note of our work in Birmingham, our determination to be free. In this book, Dr. King explains, in the clearest way I’ve ever heard, how nonviolence—“The Sword that Heals”—can become a powerful tool to transform, and thereby to transform systems designed to abuse people. He explains how all African Americans involved in our own liberation struggle came to embody the dignity of moral conviction and self-sacrifice. Importantly, he explains here how the way of nonviolence heals the oppressed as well as the oppressor. Rather than simply expressing hurt, anger, and victimhood, oppressed people can experience the healing necessary for bringing about the Beloved Community. It had indeed been “Bull Connor’s Birmingham,” but with Martin King, Jr., and Fred Shuttlesworth and other committed people working together, there emerged “A New Day in Birmingham.”

  Another “tool” Dr. King describes in this book is the importance of freedom songs. He shows how and why the songs were “the soul of the movement,” explaining that they are more than just “incantations of clever phrases,” but also “adaptations of the songs the slaves sang.”

  We learned some important lessons in our Birmingham struggle, and we need to apply those lessons now. As Martin said, “We can’t wait.” We cannot wait, because the jails are full of young black men, including many who are fathers but unable to parent their children. We can’t wait, because we know now that failing to make education a priority cheats the country of latent talent. We can’t wait, because our young men and women are being programmed to kill (it’s called “serving our country”).

  None of this is to suggest that the road ahead will be easy. The Birmingham struggle was difficult. But I remember something a white Birmingham businessman told me many years after the events recounted in this book. Mr. Emil Hess had the courage to acknowledge that Birmingham had catapulted America into the twentieth century.

&nbs
p; If we heed Martin Luther King’s call today, we can launch a struggle that can catapult our nation into a new century of even more exciting progress toward the ideal of peace with social justice.

  DOROTHY F. COTTON

  Introduction

  It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963.

  I see a young Negro boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a family on Long Island.

  I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in Birmingham. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood because her mother died only recently after a car accident. Neighbors say if the ambulance hadn’t come so late to take her to the all-Negro hospital the mother might still be alive. The girl’s father is a porter in a downtown department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store, where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice.

  This boy and this girl, separated by stretching miles, are wondering: Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro? In some distant past, had their forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and was the curse of punishment upon the black race? Had they shirked in their duty as patriots, betrayed their country, denied their national birthright? Had they refused to defend their land against a foreign foe?

  Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham. Yet this boy and this girl know something of the part of history which has been censored by the white writers and purchasers of board-of-education books. They know that Negroes were with George Washington at Valley Forge. They know that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed his country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks. The boy’s Sunday-school teacher has told him that one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington, D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin Banneker. Once the girl had heard a speaker, invited to her school during Negro History Week. This speaker told how, for two hundred years, without wages, black people, brought to this land in slave ships and in chains, had drained the swamps, built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whiplashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic commerce and world trade.

  Wherever there was hard work, dirty work, dangerous work—in the mines, on the docks, in the blistering foundries—Negroes had done more than their share.

  The pale history books in Harlem and Birmingham told how the nation had fought a war over slavery. Abraham Lincoln had signed a document that would come to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation. The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a hundred years late.

  The boy and the girl knew more than history. They knew something about current events. They knew that African nations had burst the bonds of colonialism. They knew that a great-great-grandson of Crispus Attucks might be ruled out of some restricted, all-white restaurant in some restricted, all-white section of a southern town, his United States Marines uniform notwithstanding. They knew that Negroes living in the capital of their own nation were confined to ghettos and could not always get a job for which they were qualified. They knew that white supremacists had defied the Supreme Court and that southern governors had attempted to interpose themselves between the people and the highest law of the land. They knew that, for years, their own lawyers had won great victories in the courts which were not being translated into reality.

  They were seeing on television, hearing from the radio, reading in the newspapers that this was the one-hundredth birthday of their freedom.

  But freedom had a dull ring, a mocking emptiness when, in their time—in the short life span of this boy and girl—buses had stopped rolling in Montgomery; sit-inners were jailed and beaten; freedom riders were brutalized and mobbed; dogs’ fangs were bared in Birmingham; and in Brooklyn, New York, there were certain kinds of construction jobs for whites only.

  It was the summer of 1963. Was emancipation a fact? Was freedom a force?

  The boy in Harlem stood up. The girl in Birmingham arose. Separated by stretching miles, both of them squared their shoulders and lifted their eyes toward heaven. Across the miles they joined hands, and took a firm, forward step. It was a step that rocked the richest, most powerful nation to its foundations.

  This is the story of that boy and that girl. This is the story of Why We Can’t Wait.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  JANUARY 1964

  I: The Negro Revolution—Why 1963?

  The bitterly cold winter of 1962 lingered throughout the opening months of 1963, touching the land with chill and frost, and then was replaced by a placid spring. Americans awaited a quiet summer. That it would be pleasant they had no doubt. The worst of it would be the nightmare created by sixty million cars, all apparently trying to reach the same destination at the same time. Fifty million families looked forward to the pleasure of two hundred million vacations in the American tradition of the frenetic hunt for relaxation.

  It would be a pleasant summer because, in the mind of the average man, there was little cause for concern. The blithe outlook about the state of the nation was reflected from as high up as the White House. The administration confidently readied a tax-reduction bill. Business and employment were at comfortable levels. Money was—for many Americans—plentiful.

  Summer came, and the weather was beautiful. But the climate, the social climate of American life, erupted into lightning flashes, trembled with thunder and vibrated to the relentless, growing rain of protest come to life through the land. Explosively, America’s third revolution—the Negro Revolution—had begun.

  For the first time in the long and turbulent history of the nation, almost one thousand cities were engulfed in civil turmoil, with violence trembling just below the surface. Reminiscent of the French Revolution of 1789, the streets had become a battleground, just as they had become the battleground, in the 1830s, of England’s tumultuous Chartist movement. As in these two revolutions, a submerged social group, propelled by a burning need for justice, lifting itself with sudden swiftness, moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger, created an uprising so powerful that it shook a huge society from its comfortable base.

  Never in American history had a group seized the streets, the squares, the sacrosanct business thoroughfares and the marbled halls of government to protest and proclaim the unendurability of their oppression. Had room-size machines turned human, burst from the plants that housed them and stalked the land in revolt, the nation could not have been more amazed. Undeniably, the Negro had been an object of sympathy and wore the scars of deep grievances, but the nation had come to count on him as a creature who could quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait. He was well trained in service and, whatever the provocation, he neither pushed back nor spoke back.

  Just as lightning makes no sound until it strikes, the Negro Revolution generated quietly. But when it struck, the revealing flash of its power and the impact of its sincerity and fervor displayed a force of a frightening intensity. Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper. The storm clouds did not release a “gentle rain from heaven,” but a whirlwind, which has not yet spent its force or attained its full momentum.

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nbsp; Because there is more to come; because American society is bewildered by the spectacle of the Negro in revolt; because the dimensions are vast and the implications deep in a nation with twenty million Negroes, it is important to understand the history that is being made today.

  II

  Some years ago, I sat in a Harlem department store, surrounded by hundreds of people. I was autographing copies of Stride Toward Freedom, my book about the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56. As I signed my name to a page, I felt something sharp plunge forcefully into my chest. I had been stabbed with a letter opener, struck home by a woman who would later be judged insane. Rushed by ambulance to Harlem Hospital, I lay in a bed for hours while preparations were made to remove the keen-edged knife from my body. Days later, when I was well enough to talk with Dr. Aubrey Maynard, the chief of the surgeons who performed the delicate, dangerous operation, I learned the reason for the long delay that preceded surgery. He told me that the razor tip of the instrument had been touching my aorta and that my whole chest had to be opened to extract it.

  “If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting,” Dr. Maynard said, “your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood.”

  In the summer of 1963 the knife of violence was just that close to the nation’s aorta. Hundreds of cities might now be mourning countless dead but for the operation of certain forces which gave political surgeons an opportunity to cut boldly and safely to remove the deadly peril.

  What was it that gave us the second chance? To answer this we must answer another question. Why did this Revolution occur in 1963? Negroes had for decades endured evil. In the words of the poet, they had long asked: “Why must the blackness of nighttime collect in our mouth; why must we always taste grief in our blood?” Any time would seem to have been the right time. Why 1963?

  Why did a thousand cities shudder almost simultaneously and why did the whole world—in gleaming capitals and mud-hut villages—hold its breath during those months? Why was it this year that the American Negro, so long ignored, so long written out of the pages of history books, tramped a declaration of freedom with his marching feet across the pages of newspapers, the television screens and the magazines? Sarah Turner closed the kitchen cupboard and went into the streets; John Wilkins shut down the elevator and enlisted in the nonviolent army; Bill Griggs slammed the brakes of his truck and slid to the sidewalk; the Reverend Arthur Jones led his flock into the streets and held church in jail. The words and actions of parliaments and statesmen, of kings and prime ministers, movie stars and athletes, were shifted from the front pages to make room for the history-making deeds of the servants, the drivers, the elevator operators and the ministers. Why in 1963, and what has this to do with why the dark threat of violence did not erupt in blood?