Why We Can't Wait

“The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a hundred years late.”

An important aim of the book is to explain to the reader why African-Americans feel they should no longer wait for civil rights to be awarded gradually. In this quote, King expands the history of their struggle for equality by countering the idea that the Emancipation Proclamation, the official end to slavery in much of America, was complete freedom. 

“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.”

King's aim in this quote is twofold. As he admits elsewhere, there was a lull in important actions after the Birmingham protests. This quote makes it clear that this lull is only temporary because full inequality has not been achieved. The second aim of the quote is to counter criticisms of the dramatic, large-scale nature of the protests. King's argument in this quote is that the intensity of the protests is appropriate given the intensity of the oppression African-Americans have suffered. 

“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.”

Throughout the book, King uses metaphors of illness and disease to describe political problems in America. In this quote, King uses his own experience of nearly dying from a knife wound to help the reader understand the danger America managed to navigate because of the impact of nonviolence. 

“The Negro also had to recognize that one hundred years after Emancipation he lived on a lonely island of economic insecurity in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Negroes are still at the bottom of the economic ladder. They live within two concentric circles of segregation. One imprisons them on the basis of color, while the other confines them within a separate culture of poverty.”

While King consistently focuses on the importance of civil rights, he also focuses on the negative impact inequality has on economic opportunity for African-Americans. The emotional language and implied comparison between an island and African-Americans is designed to make that point in a way that touches the reader's heart. 

“Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals. Both a practical and moral answer to the Negro’s cry for justice, nonviolent direct action proved that it could win victories without losing wars, and so became the triumphant tactic of the Negro Revolution of 1963.”

As a minister, King was committed both to agitating for equality and conducting himself in accordance with Christian standards for behavior. Nonviolent direct action allowed King to meet both of these goals. In this quote he explains that for the Civil Rights Movement as a whole, nonviolence allowed its adherents to succeed in changing the system when other, more militant approaches (some of which had support during this period) had failed.

“You know that this man is as good a man as you are; that from some mysterious source he has found the courage and the conviction to meet physical force with soul force.”

A principal element of African-American activism as imagined by King is black spirituality and faith. King's perspective on nonviolent direct action is that it complements African-Americans' faith by giving them the strength to confront violence and, in its emphasis on dignified and calm behavior, disarm even the most violent of opponents. 

“In 1963, once again life was proof that Negroes had their heroes, their masses of decent people, along with their lost souls. The doubts that millions have felt as to the efficacy of the nonviolent way were dissolved. And the Negroes saw that by proving the sweeping and majestic power of nonviolence to bring about the beloved community, it might be possible for him to set an example to a whole world caught up in conflict.”

King's writing frequently offers revised perspectives on popular conceptions of African-American identity. In this quote, he pushes back against the idea that African-Americans are a monolith, an undifferentiated mass of people who are all the same in terms of their habits and beliefs. African-Americans are just like everyone else; their embrace of nonviolence showed the capacity of this form of activism to transform even ordinary people into heroes.

“Faith in this method had come to maturity in Birmingham. As a result, the whole spectrum of the civil-rights struggle would undergo basic change. Nonviolence had passed the test of its steel in the fires of turmoil. The united power of segregation was the hammer. Birmingham was the anvil.”

King explains the symbolic and strategic importance of the protests in Birmingham. Given the depth of segregation and the support that it enjoyed from the power structure, the protests in Birmingham could serve as a means of refining the method of nonviolence by testing it in the most challenging of circumstances.

“The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.”

Moderates and people who support gradual liberation of African-Americans are a frequent target of King's criticism. In this quote, King attempts to mobilize moderates and bystanders by arguing that their failure to act is complicity in an unjust system, rather than neutrality.

“[W]e believed that while a campaign in Birmingham would surely be the toughest fight our civil-rights careers, it could, if successful, break the back of segregation all over the nation. The city had been the country’s chief symbol of racial intolerance. A victory there might well set forces in motion to change the entire course of the drive for freedom and justice.”

In this quote, King explains why the protests in Birmingham were strategically important. While the movement against segregation had primarily been viewed in regional terms, King's point in this quote is to show that success in Birmingham would have implications for the success of the movement on a national scale.

“An important part of the mass meetings was the freedom songs. Innocence the freedom songs are the soul of the movement. They are more than just incantations of clever phrases designed to invigorate the campaign; they are as old as a history of the Negro in America…. We sing the freedom songs today for the same reason the slave sang them, because we too are in bondage and the songs add hope to our determination that ‘We shall overcome, Black and white together, We shall overcome someday.’”

The freedom songs are symbolic of the way the Civil Rights Movement blended the influence of the black church with political activism. They also serve as a witness to the longstanding desire for freedom that permeates African-American culture and history.

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B. C. left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my hometown.”

King's Christian faith was an essential part of his engagement with the Civil Rights Movement. In this quote, he explains that his involvement in the protests in Birmingham place him squarely in the tradition of Christians who went from place to place, some very far from their homes, to preach the gospel. King's gospel in this case is a social and political one that agitates for freedom.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with a narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

One of the developments King attempts to trace in Why We Can't Wait is how the Civil Rights Movement went from a regional movement to a national one in the summer of 1963. In this quote, he uses the concept of the interrelatedness of all communities to make the argument that supposed outsiders like King were actually insiders, because inequality is a national issue. This argument is also designed to defend against a frequent accusation that segregationists made against activists, namely that they were outside agitators who had no business meddling in affairs in communities outside of their own.

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

In this quote, King makes an argument for the more militant, assertive stance of the protestors for civil rights. This stance is a direct response to critics who believed the easing of inequality would happen without direct intervention by activists. 

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been greatly disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…who paternalistically believes he can set a timetable for another man’s freedom.”

An important purpose of Why We Can't Wait is to mobilize not only African-Americans but also white moderates, the latter of whom had been sitting on the sidelines of the Civil Rights Movement. In this quote, King directly criticizes white moderates using hyperbole (overstatement) to drive home the point that their complacency and attitude toward African-Americans is part of the problem. 

“The newspapers of May 4 carried pictures of prostrate women, and policemen bending over them with raised clubs; of children marching up to the bared fangs of police dogs; of the terrible force of pressure hoses sweeping bodies into the streets…[t]his was the time of our greatest stress, and the courage and conviction of those students and adults made it our finest hour. We did not fight back, but we did not turn back. We did not give way to bitterness.”

The images of Bull Connor's forces attacking peaceful protestors brought national, positive attention to the Civil Rights Movement. King's characterization of the refusal of the protestors to engage in retaliatory violence serves both to portray them as heroic for his readers but also to show the power of nonviolence.

“The system to which they have been committed lies on its deathbed. The only imponderable is the question of how costly they will make the funeral.”

King argues in this quote that segregation is dead. This statement would have been a controversial one, especially since Birmingham at that moment was the scene of violence and was also backsliding on promises made by the business community. King's point here is that the protestors' success in forcing the segregationists power structure to deal with them was a fatal blow to the viability of the segregation. 

“The old order ends, no matter what best deals remain, when the enslaved, within themselves, bury the psychology of servitude. This is what happened last year…this was the invisible but vast field of victory.”

Nonviolent direct action has several audiences, including the segregationists who oppose civil rights and African-Americans who either participate directly or idealize those who do participate directly. For King, one of the intangible gains of nonviolent direct action is that it allowed African-Americans to become agents in their own history, rather than passive recipients of oppression.

“A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”

After the Birmingham protests, King was not content to simply chalk up the settlement there as a victory and return to his hometown. In this quote, he makes it clear that his ultimate goal is lasting, enduring change that can only come about by expanding the goals and reach of the movement.

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race…[w]e are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population…[i]t was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found a rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals.”

An important approach King uses to make the argument for the urgency of change is by revising common narratives of American history. In this quote, he revises American history by locating its foundation not at Plymouth Rock and the desire for liberty but instead in the genocide of Native Americans. Focusing on genocide as the start of the nation allows King to discuss the deep-rooted nature of racism in America and the seemingly extreme methods that will be needed to kill that ideology.

“It was the people who moved their leaders, not the leaders who moved the people.”

While there was a widespread belief that demonstrations for civil rights were the result of agitation from a few leaders like King, this quote makes it clear that the Civil Rights Movement was an organic, from-the-bottom-up movement fueled by the desires of ordinary people.

“The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery. Many poor whites, however, were the derivative victims of slavery.”

King's more mature politics extend to agitating for disadvantaged groups beyond African-Americans. Here, he argues that poor whites were victimized by slavery and its aftermath and are thus also entitled to affirmative action and reparations.

“We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views.”

In this quote, King denounces American culture as a whole for its toleration of violence. This rejection of violence and incivility is in keeping with both his Christianity and his embrace of nonviolence.