On King's Why We Can't Wait

The innocence of children, crushed by racism and a nation’s broken promises. In his introduction to Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr. presents the injustice imposed on two children, one from Harlem and one from Birmingham, in order to dramatize the appalling conditions in which African Americans live. It is seeing the faith and determination of these young people in the face of so much difficulty that convinces us that now is the time to make good on the promises of freedom and equality.

Many people today would argue that racism is largely a Southern problem, and the same would have been true in 1964. Many people, especially those in our Northern states, were certain that prejudice and bigotry were rampant in Alabama, where Governor Wallace sought to keep African Americans from gaining equal access to schools, restaurants, transportation, housing, jobs, and voting booths. But King shows us two examples, one from the South and one from the North, to illustrate that racism, although perhaps different in flavor, is rampant in both places. Both of these children are without their mothers. The girl in Birmingham lost her mother to a bigoted society that denied her access to “white” hospitals. The boy lost his mother to an economic system that denies good jobs to black Americans: his father is jobless, and his mother is forced to take a job as “a sleep-in domestic,” working for a Long Island—and therefore wealthy—family.

Perhaps it would be better if these motherless children knew no better, but King insists that they understand the injustice of their situations. Through a series of rhetorical questions, he constructs what is perhaps the question central to his argument: How can we deny opportunity to people who are not only innocent, but who have also helped to create the vast ocean of material prosperity our country enjoys?

These children are innocent, yes, but they are also heirs to a proud but humble tradition of hard work. Their fathers fought for freedom with George Washington, built the capital of our nation, did the back-breaking work that made our country wealthy. And how can we now deny them the freedom and equality they were promised, first in the Declaration of IndependenceEmancipation Proclamation? King’s accumulation of historical examples demands our attention now, shows us clearly that we cannot wait. and later by the

Some, though, would have us wait. Some would white-wash history, write what King describes as “pale history books” and deny this country’s great debt to African Americans. King points out that even a “United States Marine” will be prohibited from sitting down in a Southern restaurant, should he happen to be black. These young children recognize the hypocrisy of this “pale history” which denies their birthright, and seeing their loss of innocence moves us to recognize the fierce urgency of now.

There is no time for gradualism. We cannot wait, cannot deny these children the equality we owe them, the equality we owe to every person. This urgency rings especially true when we recognize that these children—in spite of the horrible conditions in which they live, in spite of the loss of their mothers to racism, in spite of their recognition that white history has made a deliberate attempt to erase their noble past—in spite of all these things, they have faith in a future where they can walk proudly, hand in hand, to freedom.