AUTHOR: MARTIN LUTHER KING JR
DATE: 1964
Why We Can’t Wait tells the story of Martin Luther King’s non-violent civil rights movement and its campaign against racial segregation, especially in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. As well as being a stunning historical document recording the civil rights movement at a pivotal moment in its history – at the start of what its author calls the ‘Negro Revolution’ – it is also a call to arms that continues to resonate in a world still divided along racial lines.
Martin Luther King Jr, born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, was a Baptist minister who had come to national attention as a civil rights leader by the mid-1950s, fuelled by his Christian faith and his admiration for pioneers of non-violent protest such as Mahatma Gandhi. In 1955, he was prominent in the Montgomery bus protest, prompted by the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger as the law demanded. King subsequently became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Against stiff competition, Birmingham, Alabama, was considered to be among the most racially segregated of all American cities in the early 1960s. King and the SCLC became involved in protests aimed at forcing the hand of employers to take on workers regardless of their race. The campaign also sought an end to segregation in public spaces, and was conducted on the principles of mass action (e.g. marches and protests) and non-violence.
The campaign’s demands were largely ignored by the Birmingham authorities and its business leaders. However, tensions escalated and one protest-walk, undertaken in groups of fifty moving from one of the city’s Baptist churches to City Hall, resulted in thousands of arrests. Then Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, authorized the use of high-pressure hoses and police attack dogs on protestors, with many children and bystanders also caught up in the clashes.
King was among those to end up in a prison cell in April 1963. Amid criticism of the campaign from some local religious leaders, he composed ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, which was widely circulated and brought the campaign national and international attention. It was from this letter that Why We Can’t Wait evolved, documenting the struggles of the civil rights campaign in the American South that spring and summer. While he watched Asia and Africa ‘moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence’, King was frustrated by the US’s ‘horse-and-buggy pace’.
I HAVE A DREAM
Just three months after the conclusion of the Birmingham campaign, King was a pivotal figure in the March on Washington, held on 28 August 1963, to demand greater civil rights. One of the largest rallies in the nation’s history, it attracted some quarter of a million protestors. It was here, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, that King delivered his iconic ‘I have a dream’ speech. A poll in 1999 of 137 leading scholars of public address ranked it the best political speech of the twentieth century.
Why We Can’t Wait – which King prepared in co-operation with several other prominent civil rights figures including Stanley Levison, Clarence Jones and Bayard Rustin – was a rallying call. ‘For years now, I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity,’ wrote King. ‘This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”. We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied”.’
The book seeks to put the Birmingham campaign into some historical context, and to explain why the ‘Negro Revolution’ had seemed to some observers to explode out of nowhere. King promised to those bewildered by recent events that there would be more to come. He suggested that the campaign had struck like lightning with ‘frightening intensity’ but stemmed from three centuries of abuse, humiliation and deprivation that could not ‘find voice in a whisper’. Birmingham under the yoke of ‘Bull’ Connor was, he said, reminiscent of a city in the era of slavery, where the black population was denied basic human rights and faced intimidation and violence if they complained.
He also cited the slow pace of reform following the landmark Brown v Board of Education ruling of 1954 that found segregation in public schools unconstitutional. A general lack of confidence in the political establishment and the ongoing impact of the Great Depression that hit America’s black population particularly harshly were further drivers for protest. He was, he noted, writing exactly a hundred years on from Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and yet millions remained oppressed.
King advocated the ongoing use of non-violent methods – what he described as ‘the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression’. He recognized that in Birmingham, being arrested had itself become a political act, weakening its strength as a tool of oppression. As the jails filled with prisoners united in a common cause, the sheer weight of their number proved a problem for the authorities and allowed the protestors to draw still greater public attention to their demands.
King likened the Birmingham campaign to the Battle of Bunker Hill – referencing the American War of Independence encounter in which the American forces began to seriously mobilize against their oppressor. But, he warned, the campaign in Alabama should not breed over-confidence or complacency. It was rather to be seen as the first step on a long road. He called for a bill of rights that, among other things, would look to compensate the disadvantaged for historically unpaid wages. He also sought to ally his supporters alongside poor whites and other oppressed groups. The success of such a coalition, he hoped, might ultimately foster non-violence everywhere and usher in world peace.
Such a utopian vision is yet to come to pass, but the Birmingham campaign and Why We Can’t Wait did spur change, not least the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed many forms of racial discrimination. Within Birmingham itself, the city authorities agreed to a process of desegregation. But the deal led the Klu Klux Klan to bomb King’s hotel room and, just five years later, he would be shot dead by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee. Why We Can’t Wait stands as a testament to one of the giant figures of twentieth-century geopolitics, serving as a testament of hope even as the work that King began remains to be completed.
In 2006, Barack Obama – then primed to become the first person of colour to serve as America’s president – paid tribute to a figure without whom his own ascent would have been impossible. ‘Through words,’ Obama said, ‘he gave voice to the voiceless. Through deeds he gave courage to the faint of heart. By dint of vision, and determination, and most of all faith in the redeeming power of love, he endured the humiliation of arrest, the loneliness of a prison cell, the constant threats to his life, until he finally inspired a nation to transform itself, and begin to live up to the meaning of its creed.’