Why we can’t wait-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King’s insight is on full display as he chronicles the year, 1963, and how it helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.  Focused primarily around Birmingham, Alabama – arguably the most racist and segregated city in America.  Dr. King was the head of the SCLC and they had requested for him to come to Birmingham to help quell racist activity and pursue integration but what he found there was much more complicated than what even he expected.  According to King, there were two types of negroes he fought with constantly; the passive folks who gave in to segregation, unable to fight any longer and the militant folk, who concluded all white men are devils and will resist their oppression by any means necessary.  And this fight was in addition to his battles with racism.

But his true war was against those conscientious white folks that deemed him a rabble rouser and that ‘now’ is not the right time for these sit-ins seeking integration.  Specifically the clergy, men of the clothe, his brothers in God.  And when they wrote these feeling to him in a letter, Dr. King responded in the most brilliant letter or even written piece of literature ever written – His letter from a Birmingham Jail.  While imprisoned from another demonstration he orchestrated in Birmingham, King received word that some clergy men were disappointed in his tactics and that HE was the cause of the turmoil that existed.  Frustrated and annoyed and at his wits end, King wrote back; expounding a philosophy of what’s morally right as opposed to law, order, God’s law and man’s law.  He laid the framework of ‘when is the right time?’  ‘Now,’ is the answer.

King, known for his voracious oratory skills, put together a masterful piece of literature that should be read by every citizen of the united states and every inhabitant of the world.  Rights that are civil is all that he fought for and if anyone can empathize with the plight of the African-American especially in the early 1960’s, they can truly understand and feel the passion of which King led a movement.

A must read for all.

An excerpt:

“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim…when you see the vast majority of twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky…when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you…when…your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’…when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”