Grab the Lapels

Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Why We Can’t Wait is a collection of essays by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When I was a professor, I taught The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book I read dozens of times for my teaching. When I found Dr. King’s short collection at a used bookstore, I bought it to balance my understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. To be clear, I was no slouch before reading Why We Can’t Wait. In fact, I took an entire class in college called The Civil Rights Movement. However, that was at least twenty years ago, so I dove in for a refresher.

The names of leaders and organizations were familiar to me from my schooling: Ralph Abernathy, S.C.L.C., Medgar Evers, etc. Dr. King was the president of S.C.L.C. (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), an organization behind the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and facing off with Bull Connor, a blatantly racist politician who oversaw Montgomery’s police and fire departments. The disgusting, dehumanizing piece of trash who was Bull Connor never fails to amaze me. It was his white supremacist policies that brought national attention to Montgomery, for it’s hard to ignore men and women, children and grandparents, getting attacked by police dogs and laid flat with fire hoses before being arrested for walking en masse down the streets when the images are on your nightly news and in the papers.

Originally, I assumed Why We Can’t Wait would be a collection of King’s essays from his life, but it chronicles what led up to the focus on Montgomery and the strategy behind the organization. Nothing about the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery and Birmingham was unplanned, including Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, though children are often taught Parks made a bold decision one day. She did not “suddenly decide”; she was trained, organized, and ready with backup.

Interestingly, King’s essays feel relevant to American politics today. For instance, we look to the atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza while we let Americans continue unhoused, uneducated, unemployed. King writes, “While the Negro is not so selfish as to stand isolated in concern for his own dilemma, ignoring the ebb and flow of events around the world, there is a certain bitter irony in the picture of his country championing freedom in foreign lands and failing to ensure that freedom to twenty million of its own.”

Furthermore, we have shifted in America such that patriotism and Christianity are red flags for racism and dehumanization. After King was arrested in Birmingham, he wrote about white churches ignoring the plight of their brethren in Black churches. If the church doesn’t correct course to follow the spirit of sacrifice paramount to Christianity, King predicted, “…it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.” Today’s numbers of young Christians are dwindling, demonstrating Dr. King’s concerns were correct.

Lastly, during the campaign for Kamala Harris, some Black communities rallied around her, notably those within reach of civil rights activist and politician Stacy Abrams of Georgia. However, I was shocked when I watched the news and saw many Black voters were on the fence, demanding that any Democrat meet all the needs of the Black community or risk losing a vote. Dr. King wrote about the same issue. At first, he did not endorse a presidential candidate for fear of being accused of backing someone who didn’t meet all the needs of the Black community. However, he changed course later, recognizing, “… It is time for Negroes to abandon abstract political neutrality and become less timid about voting alliances. … The Negro potential for political power is now substantial. Negroes are strategically situated in large cities, especially in the North but also in the South, and these cities in turn are decisive in state elections. These same states are the key in a Presidential race, and frequently determine the nomination.”

Though Dr. King died about sixty years ago, don’t let the black-and-white photos of the Civil Rights Movement fool you. It wasn’t so long ago, and those pictures aren’t in color because they were published in newspapers, not because color photography did not yet exist. Why We Can’t Wait continues to be a relevant book.

summer reading

  • So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison
  • Goodbye Earl by Leesa Cross-Smith
  • Girls with Long Shadows by Tennessee Hill
  • All this Can Be True by Jen Michalski
  • Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio
  • Best Laid Plans by Allison Brennan (Lucy Kincaid #9)
  • Big Man with a Shovel by Joe Amato (did not finish)
  • Going Bovine by Libba Bray (did not finish)
  • Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring by Zach Plague
  • Kittentits by Holly Wilson (did not finish)
  • Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
  • Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
  • Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
  • The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
  • The Outsider by Richard Wright
  • Building a Life Out of Words by Shawn Smucker
  • The Last God by Jean Davis
  • Homing by Sherrie Flick
  • The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli
  • Bitter Thirst by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs #8)

15 comments

  1. I am always glad to see someone challenging and enriching their own established knowledge with new information. Even if we know a thing, we have to keep learning to keep it fresh and to deepen our understanding. 💪

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  2. Sadly, King has been so sanitized. He was such a radical but all we get these days are the I have a Dream sanitized for the feelings of white people. Also, yeah, I was taught in school Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus on a spur of the moment decision because she was so tired after working all day. She and all of the people who participated in the boycotts and marches, etc were highly trained in nonviolence, but all that gets left out too. And now with the current government we don’t even get the sanitized versions anymore.

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    • One of the reasons that I used to teach the Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was still teaching college students is because everyone got that really sanitized version of MLK back in public school. I wanted them to see some of the more radical ideas, and how those ideas really change the hearts and minds of their believers. In this book, we don’t even get the “I Have a Dream” speech, which I can appreciate because there’s already so much emphasis on it. I do get that it’s inspiring, but it’s also not actionable. It’s a wish list. It’s literally a dream world.

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  3. “Furthermore, we have shifted in America such that patriotism and Christianity are red flags for racism and dehumanization.” It will be a long time before the US will be able to claim again with a straight face that it is fighting abroad for freedom and democracy. I just hope you have a little of both still left to you at the end of this current period. I think even MLK would be astonished at the overt racism of your current administration. Every day we see stories of people being arrested and deported because they are not white, and of senior people in the bureaucracy and armed forces being removed for being Black or female, 

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    • I don’t know that MLK would be astonished by the overt racism because it was so prevalent and normalized during his life. For instance, the states in which they were fighting for freedom had already banned segregation, but it was the police force and the local politicians who were perpetuating it openly, and to the praise of many white citizens. The president and the national guard had to step in to make them comply with the law. The president only got involved after the publicity got so bad. I think today would look awfully familiar.

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  4. Wow, I feel like I learned so much about the civil rights movement just reading this review! I had no idea about Rosa Parks and the fact that was planned. Incredible.

    I often think of how people will look back at us in 50 or 60 years and judge our actions now. I remember watching a movie about slavery with friends a few years ago, and one of them commenting that in a few decades, the way we treated slaves back then will feel to them as how we currently treat people in the LGTBQ community.

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    • Hahaha, we’re not even treating Black people that much better now. We make it hard for them to vote by having limited hours at the polls (I’m very few polling locations), poorly funded schools (which a lot of social scientists have argued is the new form of segregation) in Black neighborhoods, food deserts, etc. If you can read a book on the civil Rights movement in general, you’ll learn a lot, and I think you’ll understand a lot more about America. One of the reasons that I really got into Black history and literature is because I realized the Black experience IS America. Everything here makes so much more sense when you learn about it.

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      • I have no doubt you are right Melanie, and I think this is hard for me to wrap my head around as a Canadian. Not to say things are SO much better here, but I would say the line between those with and those without are a bit more blurred up here. Our public healthcare goes a long way towards that I think.

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        • Affordable health care access is life changing. I know there are racial barriers in health care, too, from not enough Black doctors because they face discrimination in the field to a history of segregated medical facilities.

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  6. This seems like a good reminder that very few of the current issues in politics are new. There’s no such thing as a time when America (or any country for that matter) was actually great.

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    • No, and our perception is often dictated by the media. Think about how all the pictures you see of MLK are in black and white, but at the time there was color photography. They’re only in black and white because they were printed in newspapers. The only reason the president acted against the police breaking the law and releasing dogs and fire hoses on innocent citizens is because it finally made it to television media, and the PR was terrible.

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