SOME THINGS CANNOT WAIT

“When you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’…”

“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, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people…”

“When you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you…”

“When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’…”

In these heart-wrenching scenarios posed in Letter from Birmingham Jail, written on April 16, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. encountered an internal epiphany.  No longer was the decision to “wait” a calculated, political gambit.  No more could he derive the calculus for correction so desperately needed in America by looking to his patriotic commitment, his religious upbringing, his strong faith, or his philosophy of civil disobedience.  For he had reached the point where looking through the eyes of his 5-year old son and his 6-year old daughter reduced the call for forbearance by his brethren to a call to hopelessness for their children.

“Wait!" he went on.

“It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never."

Martin Luther King may have been willing to continue his leadership toward peaceful resistance and civil disobedience. But his appeal went on in what seems to have been a horrific vision of the future to which he now realized he would be condemning his daughter and his son…

“When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society…”

King knew he would be sentencing his children, and all children who shared their destiny of waiting, to an unconscionable life. 

He knew that change was coming, and saw it in other countries:

“We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait."

And so on that day, in that jail cell, Martin Luther King Jr. made his decision to stop the waiting.  He searched his heart, saw a future he was unwilling to abide, and concluded his thesis with his famous clarion call:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Today, as we reflect on the life and contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr., we would do well to read this famous letter. If we have children we love, we might do well to read it with them, or at least with them in mind. 

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

I read it this morning.  It was more poignant today than the first time I read it over three decades ago. 

Today I read it in the context of grand-nieces and nephews I love. 

I read it in the context of history then and now. 

I read it in the context of the iconic vision I have of him shouting “I have a dream!” 

And henceforth, I know I will read it in the context of the necessary precursor of that dream, which was then and is now an everlasting truth:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."