Why We Can't Wait

In “The Sword That Heals,” King provides a history of African-American responses to oppression. King systematically critiques these responses to support his argument that nonviolent direct action is the best tool for forcing change.

King first explains that the revolution was not the result of a loss of patience by African-Americans. African-Americans tolerated repression silently because they were forced to do so. During slavery, “physical force” was used to oppress African-Americans “emotionally and physically” (17-18).

After the Civil War, Jim Crow laws and “open brutality” were the main means of oppressing African-Americans; the psychological impact of these forms of oppression resulted in “a demeanor that passed for patience in the eyes of the white man, but covered a powerful impatience in the heart of the Negro” (18). Segregationists used this external demeanor to claim that outside agitators were responsible for what happened in 1963. This self-protective mask also explains why even well-intentioned whites are not able to get straight answers on the issue of civil rights when they discuss the issue with African-Americans, who are economically dependent on white goodwill.

Another tactic used to suppress African-Americans was the threat of jailing and the severe beatings that frequently occurred there. King argues that in his present moment, in both the North and South, there are “unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities” (20). Nonviolent action is powerful because it makes African-Americans, even children, willing to go to jail tofight for their rights. Faced with the African-Americans who are willing to accept undeserved punishment, the oppressors are not sure what to do. The encounter between what King calls “physical force” and “soul force” makes oppressors “feel defeated and secretly ashamed” in the face of the courage of African-Americans (21).

Another means for blocking African-Americans’ rights is the use of tokenism—allowing just a chosen few access to positions and institutions instead of opening access to all. King acknowledges that change has to start somewhere, but tokenism is not real change because “[i]ts purpose is not to begin the process, but instead to end the process of protest and pressure.It is a hypocritical gesture, not a constructive first step” (23).

In the second part of the chapter, King offers a history of African-American responses to inequality after the Emancipation Proclamation.After Reconstruction, Booker T. Washington argued that African-Americans should “[b]e content…with doing well what the times permit[ted],” a path that “had too little freedom in its present and too little promise in its future” (25). In the early twentieth century, W. E. B. DuBois advanced the idea of a “‘talented tenth’ to rise and pull behind it the mass of the race,” a program King describes as a “tactic for an aristocratic elite who would themselves be benefited while leaving behind the ‘untalented’ 90 percent” (25).

After World War I, Marcus Garvey advanced a back-to-Africa movement that gave his supporters a sense of pride but that “was doomed” because it insisted that thoroughlyAmerican blacks should go back to the lands of their ancestors instead of looking forward (26). When Garvey’s movement faltered, groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) stepped in with a strategy that relied on the federal courts as “the vehicle that would be utilized to combat oppression, particularly in Southern states, which are operating under the guise of legalistics to keep the Negro down” (26). King praises the legal victories of the NAACP but notes the slowness of the implementation of laws as a criticism of this approach.

During the 1950s, some African-Americans advocated for violent resistance. King believes this approach was not successful because African-Americans “could not perceive the slightest prospect of victory in this approach” because they were “unarmed, unorganized, untrained, disunited and, most important, psychologically and morally unprepared for the deliberate spilling of blood” (27). King identifies African-American spirituality, reflected in the significant role churches played in the Montgomery bus boycotts in 1955-1956, as another reason for African-Americans’ rejection of this approach in favor of nonviolence.

King also discusses the Nation of Islam, noting that it is similar to Garvey’s movement in its call for racial separation. It differs from Garveyism in its support for staying in the US instead of going to Africa. King dismisses their movement as a “pessimistic,” marginal one that is popular only “in a handful of big city ghettos” (29).

Lastly, King describes efforts to build coalitions between poor white Southerners and African-Americans. In theory, the poor economic conditions suffered by both groups should have made them natural allies, but “underprivileged southern whites saw the color that separated them from Negroes more clearly than they saw the circumstances that bound them together in mutual interest” (29).

In the third section, King goes into more detail about the attraction of nonviolence for African-Americans. According to King, African-Americans’ respect for nonviolent action stemmed from their knowledge of the use of nonviolent direct action by early Christians, American colonists, and Mahatma Gandhi to defeat very powerful governments. Finally, although there is an American tradition of masculinity and the frontier that celebrates “violent retaliation against injustice” (31), there is also another tradition that supports “moral force” (33) over physical force; Atticus Finch and Scout from Harper Lee’s novel,To Kill a Mockingbird, exemplify this tradition.

The use of moral force allowed African-Americans in 1963 to act in alignment with their religious beliefs and secure their own liberation, and to do so in a constructive way. The use of nonviolence is ultimately productive because it focuses on systems of oppression, instead of on individuals. The brave actions of nonviolent resistors in Montgomery showed that it was not the way of cowards.

Furthermore, nonviolence has several advantages over violence. Nonviolent direct action allows participants to fight for their own freedom regardless of age, physical condition, social rank, or race. The only requirements are that “nonviolent soldiers… examine and burnish their greatest weapons—their heart, their conscience, their courage and their sense of justice” (34). Against such people, the power structure was “impotent” in 1963 because it did not permit it to hide its acts of brutality from public attention. King admits that some protestors did suffer violence or even death, but the number was surprisingly low because whites in power were confronted with “Negroes who for the first time [were] due to look back at a white man, eye to eye” (34).

King also argues that nonviolent direct action had advantages over other methods in 1963. The dignity required to engage in nonviolent action directly countered racist stereotypes of African-Americans. The “courage and discipline” of those who actively participated also “healed the wounds” of those who supported them in spirit or financially because it gave them a sense of pride and honor (37).

King opens the fourth section of his chapter by noting that some people may wonder why so much time elapsed between the successful use of nonviolent direct action in the Montgomery bus boycotts in 1955-1956 and the summer of 1963. King explains that it takes time to perfect methods and for those methods to gain traction because of opposition coming from both ends of the political spectrum.

King believes that the initial failure of African-Americans to embrace nonviolent direct action after the Montgomery bus boycotts also stemmed from a “fallacious and dangerously divisive philosophy” that saw direct action as a “substitute for all other approaches, attacking especially the legal methods” used during the 1950s (37). Such a misunderstanding by both blacks and whites creates divisions within the movement for civil rights and ignores the complementary nature of nonviolent direct action and the legal approach.

The delay in broader adoption of nonviolent direct actions was also the result of the misconception that what happened in Montgomery was a fluke that could not be replicated elsewhere. No one thought African-Americans from other places would be willing to give up so much. Although this criticism seemed to be borne out by the failure to desegregate lunch counters with sit-ins in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, King points out that inexperience was at fault, not method, and that activists learned from their mistakes.

The upside of the protests in Albany was that the sit-ins generated “thousands” of black voters who played a decisive role in local and state elections, including the selection of the first “Georgia governor to respect and enforce the law equally” (39-40). The response of the Albany authorities—shutting down all public facilities and transportation to avoid integration—damaged them because they had to deny whites access as well. To critics who see the small percentage of African-Americans arrested as a failure (5%), King responds by asking them to consider what 5% would mean in more populous places like New York City.

While hasty dismissals of nonviolent direct action should be avoided, King also cautions supporters of this approach against exaggeration. There are real costs to volunteering to be arrested, like the loss of jobs and psychological suffering, that most people are not prepared to pay: “Negroes are human, not superhuman. Like all people, they have different personalities, diverse financial interests and varied aspirations” (41). Some African-American individuals may even be less than moral. What is most important is that “decency, honor and courage” predominate among most people (41). The summer of 1963 proved that most African-Americans did have these traits.

In the final part of the chapter, King highlights what distinguished Birmingham, Alabama, from other places in 1963. It had a violent response to unionization efforts, a longstanding history of oppression of human rights, and the moneyed interests and power structure were closely identified with each other. King closes by arguing that the efficacy of nonviolent direct action in such a place was proof of its maturity and viability as an approach.