How Long Must We Wait?

Six decades ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail cell that it's time to be impatient and demand change. His words could not be more relevant.

Newly reinstated Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, their fists raised before they were expelled, don’t want to wait anymore. (Photo by Seth Herald/Getty Images)

Sixty years ago on April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., dressed in work clothes, marched from the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and into a police wagon. That same day, from the Birmingham City Jail, he began to pen one of his most famous pieces of writing. Completed on April 16 and published the following month, it was a response to eight white clergymen who called the nonviolent mass demonstration confronting the city’s system of segregation “unwise and untimely.”

King noted that these religious leaders “deplore the demonstrations that are taking place,” yet do not “express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstration into being.” He said that he could not “sit idly by in Atlanta,” that he had an obligation to be in Birmingham and act.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote in one of his most famous observations. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

He had much more to say—in his conclusion, he admitted, “Never before have I written a letter this long”—and it’s his comments about waiting that I want to linger on for a moment. They begin like this: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” And then:

Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was "well timed" according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

And he ends this portion of his argument with this eloquent assertion: “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

Tragically, King’s profound reflection has lost none of its relevance, not when we consider the country’s abject failure to successfully confront the epidemic of gun violence and particularly the abominable system that enables people to buy assault weapons and openly carry them on American streets.

Nor when we consider the abject failure of our body politic to stem the poisonous spread of white supremacy, hatred toward the most vulnerable among us, hostility toward the most basic principles of equality and the right to vote, and enthusiastic support for sociopathic demagogues bent on turning Americans against democracy by degrading their capacity to know the difference between right and wrong and true and false.

In recent weeks I’ve been lingering—obsessing perhaps—on the Republican supermajority in Tennessee who expelled two young Black lawmakers. For what alleged crime? Their lack of “decorum” while demonstrating on behalf of the majority who yearn to end gun violence with policies and laws that prioritize human safety and freedom. Why do we still live in a world where the presumed right to acquire and use assault weapons takes precedence over a more fundamental right of others to be free from violence?

"We've just been expelled, but we're back," Rep. Justin Pearson told a crowd on the Tennessee capitol steps yesterday after he was reappointed to his legislative seat (as his colleague, Rep. Justin Jones, was several days earlier). "You can't expel hope. You can't expel our voice. You can't expel our fight.” After reading the names of the six gun victims in the recent Nashville mass shooting, Pearson added: "Gun violence is impacting and hurting every part of our community. They tried to expel this movement of justice, but it cannot be stopped."

Much has rightly been made of Reps. Pearson and Jones for their inspirational words and how they resonate with the history of the civil rights movement and the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. more than a half century ago. But it may be this notion of impatience that strikes me most strongly; that is, the need for action now, not when it’s “timely,” not when it’s “wise,” not when the oppressor decides it’s time for the oppressed to be given what they want—which is to say never.

No, they would have anyone who hungers for justice and real safety, for the “mere” right to be free from violence, to wait—not for tomorrow, not for thoughts and prayers to work their magic, but likely forever. Amid this reality, where too many of those in power are determined to concentrate power and wealth for the good of the richest among us (no matter how much death and destruction it causes), patience does not look like a virtue. Quite the contrary.

Nor, by the way, does civility always look so virtuous. As I wrote in a Washington Post essay several years ago during the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump (when Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized the need to avoid language “not conducive to civil discourse”): “When civility means treating both sides as equal, when a mind-bending onslaught of lies…is expected to be met with courtesy, a demand for civility risks becoming an instrument of power by the majority party to neutralize or even silence criticism and the critics.”

In an unusual move earlier this week that I believe reflects the impatient unwillingness to swallow Trump-inspired aggression, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed a lawsuit against Trump-defender Jim Jordan, the weaponizing chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The suit asserts that Jordan, other members of his committee and Trump “are participating in a campaign of intimidation, retaliation, and obstruction,” with a flood of threats targeting Bragg personally.

“Since Mr. Trump falsely predicted he would be arrested on March 18, 2023, in fact, the District Attorney’s Office has received more than 1,000 calls and emails from Mr. Trump’s supporters, many of which are threatening and racially charged,” the suit states. “But rather than denounce efforts to vilify and denigrate the District Attorney and the grand jury process, House Republicans are participating in those efforts.”

Bragg’s suit is also seeking to block a subpoena for testimony by former Manhattan prosecutor Mark Pomerantz and Jordan’s committee’s demands for “confidential documents and testimony from the district attorney himself as well as his current and former employees and officials.” The suit’s summation: “Congress lacks any valid legislative purpose to engage in a free-ranging campaign of harassment in retaliation for the District Attorney’s investigation and prosecution of Mr. Trump under the laws of New York.”

It’s possible to dig deep into the weeds of Bragg’s legal maneuver—which Politico, for example, examined yesterday as a legal strategy devised in 2016 and 2017 in response to Republican Congressional interference in a New York investigation into whether Exxon Mobil lied to investors about the risks of climate change. But I would suggest the more central questions concern the continuing effort by Trump and his defenders to slow down the process and try their damnedest to scare off prosecutors—and the necessity of counterpunching with great energy.

As King reminds us from a Birmingham jail all those decades ago, “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice.” I would suggest that time is now.

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