“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.” (King 2)
While “today,” in the above quote by Martin Luther King, Jr., references a movement over forty years past, readers of King’s narrative Why We Can’t Wait cannot help but feel his urgency as if it were “today” and come to internalize the immediacy that called forth the need for action King and other civil rights movement leaders fought so hard to convey to a nation. In this text, King explains to his readers why Americans cannot wait any longer to stand up against social injustices upon Black Americans. Social justice delayed, argues King, is “justice denied” (69). One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, King calls an end to enforced “patience” when he accepts Fred Shuttlesworth’s, chairman of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (A.C.H.R.), invitation to bring the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C. L.C.) to Birmingham and births a movement destined to change the life of every American regardless of race: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (65). King’s narrative Why We Can’t Wait explains to readers how Black Americans struggled to attain “the American dream” amidst unjust laws and racism, thereby forcing Blacks to enact a social revolution.
King informs readers that there are just laws and unjust laws; it is the unjust laws that prove to be the greatest foe of the Civil Rights Movement. After the Supreme Court desegregated the military and the public school system they sabotaged their own ruling by approving the Pupil Placement Law that permitted states to determine which schools children may be placed. As King explains, this ruling in essence permitted a back-door system of continued segregation. Furthermore, just when Ralph Abernathy and King decided to “present [their] bodies as personal witnesses in this crusade,” Bull Connor wins an injunction directing the movement to cease the protest marches until a court could hear the case (57-59). “An unjust law,” according to King, “is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself” (71). This code breaks the most basic law of humanity, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The white dominate society did not have to subject their “patience” to submitting to and obeying the “unjust laws” that clearly targeted one section of society. In his book, King reveals the inner conflict and mixed emotions of the S.C.L.C. leaders with civil disobedience; however, they understood that the injunction was another instrument the South used to “block the direct-action civil-rights drive and to prevent Negro citizens and their white allies from engaging in peaceable assembly, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment” (58). The injunction would delay justice for several more years. In order to fight these social injustices, King enacted a plan that would highlight the brutalities of “official” government as well as emphasize the vulnerable position of Black Americans in the hands of those whose job it was to “protect and serve.”
“Begin modest,” argues King (44), and King could not begin more modest than non-violent direct action. King explains that “it is an axiom of social change that no revolution can take place without a methodology suited to the circumstances of the period” (20). Non-violent direct action works specifically because it “seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue”—an issue that “can no longer be ignored” (67). This action, which welcomed people of any age, sex, race, or ability, fed on the knowledge that “we were right” (49) and incorporated tactics such as the defenseless submission to verbal and physical abuse by legal authorities, peaceful marches, freedom songs, and boycotts. By becoming outwardly powerless revolutionaries became politically and spiritually powerful.
As readers we must remember that we read King’s narrative with the luxury of a more informed awareness of our history. King’s contemporary audience depended on news accounts for information on current events; these venues of media were controlled by the white dominant society and were typically biased accounts construed in such a way as to not rouse emotions or back lash from the Black community or their White allies. As a result, most Americans, especially White Americans, were unaware of the dire and brutal circumstances that Black Americans lived and suffered daily. It is in this context that King felt compelled to explain the impetus that lead to the stormy Civil Rights Movement as well as to lay out constructive ideas for future civil action, such as civic restitution and the formation of a powerful Black American political bloc. People, he observes, cannot be “half free or half alive” (117-18). Moreover, “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live” (Shuttlesworth qtd. by King 44). According to King, the summer of 1963 “erupted into lightning flashes, trembled with thunder and vibrated to the relentless, growing rain of protest come to life through the land” (1). Sometimes we feel most alive after we have survived a storm.
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