Martin Luther King, Jr.Æs book Why We Can't Wait was published in 1963 when Dr. King was a civil rights leader in Birmingham, Alabama. As a minister from Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. King went to Birmingham where he successfully organized and led a 382-day boycott of that cityÆs segregated public busing. Along with other African-Americans, Dr. King was jailed for his political actions. His book is both an analysis of the events in which he was involved in Birmingham, as well as his thinking on the overall problem of racial inequality and injustice in the United States.
Dr. King was trying to explain what he called the revolution, which means Southern blacks working together for the first time in a non-violent but carefully organized way to achieve social justice. Dr. King maintains that in the summer of 1963, the blacks of America decided that they could make themselves free. ôThe summer of 1963,ö he wrote, ôwas a revolution because it changed the face of Americaö (107). The book shows in part how Dr. King achieved his overall goals in the face of brutal opposition from the Birmingham police and civil authorities. Basically his plan was to boycott the buses and businesses until Birmingham city officials consented to change the laws and customs of the Jim Crow south. Although it was essentially an economic boycott, the crusade was based on Christian principles. Dr. King gave the bus boycott crusade a moral underpinning that local blacks could both believe in and relate to. They would refuse to work and to give their services, not shop, and withhold their money until their goals were achieved. As Dr. King wrote, ôThe Negro, who had realized for many years that he was not truly free, awoke from a stupor of inaction with the cold dash of realizationà.ö (11).
Dr. KingÆs strategy was to use non-violent resistance, and in the end it worked. öNonviolence is a powerful and just weapon,ö Dr. King wrote, ôboth a practical and mor...