Why We Can't Wait

Although the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, is not directly recounted in the book, King describes the significance of his assassination in detail in the concluding chapter of the volume, “The Days to Come”: “We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life, and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with him” (180).

For King, the death of Kennedy represents America’s fascination with and acceptance of violence as an appropriate response to political differences. The complacency of bystanders and the inability of people to understand segregation in the South is a stain on the national character, King implies in this quote, and are just as much to blame for Kennedy’s death as the shooter.

King uses a quote from Louis Harris to make the argument that the national mourning for Kennedy transformed his death into a “‘massive rejection of extremism from either right or left’” (181). The irony of this last perspective on Kennedy’s death as the beginning of a repudiation of extremism is that King himself was assassinated four years later; the reader’s knowledge of King’s assassination undercuts King’s more hopeful reading.

King describes the freedom songs—the spirituals and work songs sung by demonstrators—as “the soul of the movement” (64). These songs, dating back to the times of slavery, represent African-Americans’ enduring desire for freedom, their solidarity with each other, and their bravery during the historical moment recounted by King. Since some of the songs are spirituals, they also represent the importance of faith in African-American culture, and the role of spirituality and the black church in political movements.

King first describes Room 30 in “Bull Connor’s Birmingham,” the third chapter of the book. As the informal headquarters of the SCLC and its local affiliate, Room 30 is a symbol of the cooperation between the national and local civil rights groups and the overall leadership of the movement. King also recounts that the room was bombed in the aftermath of the marches; its destruction highlights the use of violence to silence activism and the vulnerability of the leadership of the civil rights groups. 

King mentions in the second chapter of the book that jails in general were used as threats to force African-Americans to comply with segregation (20). Bull Connor and Birmingham’s law enforcement used the city jail in exactly this way. Birmingham’s jail thus represents the use of coercion and the criminal justice system to support segregation. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” also emphasizes the jail as a space in which faith is tested by the power structure, a perspective on incarceration that King traces all the way back to early Christians, who were persecuted in the Roman world.

In September of 1963, four girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which was perpetrated by a member of the Ku Klux Klan. King not only notes these four young victims of segregation, but also describes the death of two additional children in the aftermath of the Birmingham protests. The killing of these children represents the moral bankruptcy of segregation and the threat its continued existence posed to African-Americans’ future.