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First published in the United States of America by Harper & Row 1964
First published in Penguin Classics 2018
This edition of Why We Can’t Wait is based on an earlier edition, published in the United States in 1963. Some spelling and punctuation have been adjusted, and obvious errors have been corrected
Copyright © Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963, 1964
Copyright renewed © Coretta Scott King, Dexter King, Martin Luther King III, Yolanda King, Bernice King, 1986
Cover photograph © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
ISBN: 978-0-241-34545-0
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
Follow Penguin
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.
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