The Work
Why We Can't Wait was published by Harper & Row in 1964. At approximately 180 pages, it is organized around the Birmingham campaign of 1963 - the most dramatic and strategically decisive campaign of the Civil Rights Movement - and includes the full text of the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' King's most sustained piece of theological-ethical argument. Written in the margins of newspapers and on scraps of paper while King was imprisoned in Birmingham City Jail in April 1963, the Letter is one of the most important documents in American religious and political history: a philosophical defense of civil disobedience, a critique of white moderate Christianity, and a theological argument grounded in Augustine, Aquinas, and the Hebrew prophets.
The book's title addresses the most common objection made by white moderates to the Birmingham campaign - the argument that the movement was moving too fast, that change must come gradually, that demonstrations inflamed rather than resolved racial tensions. King's answer is 'Why We Can't Wait': a historical argument that Black Americans had waited 340 years for their constitutional and God-given rights, and a theological argument that justice delayed is justice denied.
Biblical Engagement
Amos 5:24 - 'Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream' - opens the Letter's argument and recurs throughout the book. King positions himself in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets who spoke truth to power regardless of consequences, and who measured the health of a society not by its religious observances but by its treatment of the poor and oppressed. The Birmingham campaign is an enactment of this prophetic tradition: the church (represented by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) confronting the state (represented by Bull Connor and the Birmingham city government) with the demands of God.
Matthew 5:44 - 'But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you' - appears in the Letter's discussion of nonviolent direct action. King insists that the Birmingham demonstrators - who faced fire hoses, police dogs, and clubs - were practicing the most radical form of Christian obedience: loving their enemies in deed, exposing themselves to violence without retaliating, and thereby exposing the violence of the system that opposed them. 'Creative extremism' - King's phrase - is a form of the love of enemies.
Romans 13:1 - 'Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God' - is the text that the white moderates used to counsel compliance with segregationist law. King's response in the Letter is to draw on Augustine and Aquinas: a law that contradicts the natural moral law (or the law of God) is not a true law and creates no obligation of obedience. Acts 5:29 - 'We ought to obey God rather than men' - is the countertext: the apostles refused the Sanhedrin's command to stop preaching, and this civil disobedience was righteous. King's entire legal-ethical argument is that there are two kinds of law (just and unjust) and that the obligation to obey the first creates an obligation to resist the second.
Galatians 3:28 - 'There is neither Jew nor Greek... bond nor free... for ye are all one in Christ Jesus' - provides the theological grounds of the Letter's constitutional argument. Segregation is wrong not primarily because it is illegal (King knew its illegality under the Constitution was contested) but because it contradicts the fundamental dignity of persons made in the image of God and redeemed in Christ. Every human being has an irreducible worth that no political or social system has the right to deny.
Isaiah 40:4-5 - 'Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain' - is the prophetic vision of social transformation that King invokes throughout Why We Can't Wait. The Civil Rights Movement is a form of the social leveling that Isaiah announces: the valley of racial degradation shall be exalted; the mountain of white supremacy shall be brought low.
The Letter from Birmingham Jail
King wrote the Letter in response to an 'open letter' signed by eight white Alabama clergymen, published in the Birmingham News on April 12, 1963, which called the demonstrations 'unwise and untimely.' The Letter is addressed formally 'My Dear Fellow Clergymen' and takes the form of a patient, comprehensive, and ultimately devastating response to each of their objections.
The Letter's central distinction - between just and unjust laws - draws directly on Aquinas's Summa Theologica (I-II, Q. 96, Art. 4: 'An unjust law is no law at all') and Augustine's Confessions (Book 3: 'An unjust law seems to be no law at all'). King gives the distinction a biblical foundation: a just law is one that 'uplifts human personality' and accords with the moral law; an unjust law is one that 'degrades human personality' and contradicts divine and natural law. Segregation is an unjust law because it tells one group of people that they are inferior - a moral lie that damages both the oppressor (by giving them a false sense of superiority) and the oppressed.
The Letter's sharpest critique is directed not at the Ku Klux Klan but at the 'white moderate, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.' The white moderate's call for patience is a form of complicity in the continuation of injustice: it prioritizes order over justice and comfort over righteousness. King invokes Paul's 'creative extremism' - the apostle's willingness to turn the world upside down (Acts 17:6) - and Jesus's 'creative extremism' in the Sermon on the Mount to legitimize the demonstrators' willingness to accept suffering in order to create the 'tension' that forces moral confrontation.
Author and Context
The Birmingham campaign of 1963 was deliberately planned as the most confrontational campaign of the movement to date. Birmingham was chosen because it was the most rigorously segregated city in America and because its Public Safety Commissioner, Bull Connor, was reliably brutal. The SCLC's calculation was that Connor's violence, broadcast on national television, would be more effective than any argument in forcing federal intervention - a calculation that proved correct. The images of fire hoses and police dogs turned against peaceful demonstrators, including children, produced a national moral crisis that led directly to President Kennedy's commitment to civil rights legislation.
King was arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963, and held in solitary confinement in Birmingham City Jail. He began the Letter when a fellow prisoner smuggled in a copy of the white clergy's letter; he wrote in the margins, continued on scraps of paper provided by his lawyer, and completed the draft in jail. The Letter circulated as a pamphlet, was published in The Christian Century and Liberation magazine, and was included in Why We Can't Wait.
Reception and Legacy
The 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' is now taught in virtually every American secondary school and college. It is recognized as one of the great documents of American political philosophy and Christian social ethics - comparable in scope and depth to Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' and Lincoln's Second Inaugural. Its combination of prophetic passion, philosophical precision, and pastoral care for the opponents it addresses is unique in American literature.
Why We Can't Wait established the theological and ethical framework for the Civil Rights Movement at its most intense period. Its legacy extends to every subsequent movement that has grounded civil disobedience in the distinction between just and unjust law.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Amos 5:18-24 (prophetic call for justice), Romans 13:1-7 and Acts 5:27-29 (obedience to human authority and its limits), Matthew 5:38-48 (love of enemies as the ground of nonviolence), Micah 6:6-8 (what the Lord requires), and Isaiah 58:6-7 (the fast that God chooses: releasing the oppressed).
Further Reading
- Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 (1998) - the second volume of Branch's trilogy, covering the Birmingham campaign. - James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (1986) - the standard anthology, including the full text of the Letter. - Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation (2013) - the best recent study devoted entirely to the Letter.