“The Time for Freedom Has Come”
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: September 10, 1961
Location: New York, N.Y.
Genre: Published Article
Topic: Brown v. Board of Education
Freedom Rides
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Nonviolence
Details
In the following New York Times Magazine article, King describes the impact that young black students have had on the African American freedom struggle. He asserts that students are not revolting against “conservative leadership” but are rather “carrying forward a revolutionary destiny of a whole people consciously and deliberately.” Insisting that students are “seeking to save the soul of America,” he adds that “in sitting down at the lunch counters, they are in reality standing up for the best in the American dream.”
On a chill morning in the autumn of 1956, an elderly, toil-worn Negro woman in Montgomery, Ala., began her slow, painful four-mile walk to her job. It was the tenth month of the Montgomery bus boycott, which had begun with a life expectancy of one week. The old woman’s difficult progress led a passer-by to inquire sympathetically if her feet were tired. Her simple answer became the boycotters’ watchword. “Yes, friend, my feet is real tired, but my soul is rested.”1
Five years passed and once more Montgomery arrested the world’s attention. Now the symbolic segregationist is not a stubborn, rude bus driver. He emerges in 1961 as a hoodlum stomping the bleeding face of a Freedom Rider. But neither is the Negro today an elderly woman whose grammar is uncertain; rather, he is college bred, Ivy League-clad, youthful, articulate and resolute. He has the imagination and drive of the young, tamed by discipline and commitment. The nation and the world have reacted with astonishment at these students cast from a new mold, unaware that a chain reaction was accumulating explosive force behind a strangely different facade.
Generating these changes is a phenomenon Victor Hugo described in these words: “There is no greater power on earth than an idea whose time has come.”2 In the decade of the Sixties the time for freedom for the Negro has come. This simple truth illuminates the motivations, the tactics and the objectives of the students’ daring and imaginative movement.
The young Negro is not in revolt, as some have suggested, against a single pattern of timid, fumbling, conservative leadership. Nor is his conduct to be explained in terms of youth’s excesses.3 He is carrying forward a revolutionary destiny of a whole people consciously and deliberately. Hence the extraordinary willingness to fill the jails as if they were honors classes and the boldness to absorb brutality, even to the point of death, and remain nonviolent. His inner strength derives from his goal of freedom and the leadership role he has grasped even at a time when some of his white counterparts still grope in philosophical confusion searching for a personal goal with human values, searching for security from economic instability, and seeking relief from the haunting fear of nuclear destruction.
The campuses of Negro colleges are infused with a dynamism of both action and philosophical discussion. The needs of a surging period of change have had an impact on all Negro groups, sweeping away conventional trivialities and escapism.
Even in the Thirties, when the college campus was alive with social thought, only a minority was involved in action. Now, during the sit-in phase, when a few students were suspended or expelled, more than one college saw the total student body involved in a walkout protest.4 This is a change in student activity of profound significance. Seldom, if ever, in American history has a student movement engulfed the whole student body of a college.
In another dimension an equally striking change is altering the Negro campuses. Not long ago the Negro collegian imitated the white collegian. In attire, in athletics, in social life, imitation was the rule. For the future, he looked to a professional life cast in the image of the middle-class white professional. He imitated with such energy that Gunnar Myrdal described the ambitious Negro as “an exaggerated American.”5
Today the imitation has ceased. The Negro collegian now initiates. Groping for unique forms of protest, he created the sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Overnight his white fellow students began to imitate him. As the movement took hold, a revival of social awareness spread across campuses from Cambridge to California. It spilled over the boundaries of the single issue of desegregation and encompassed questions of peace, civil liberties, capital punishment and others.6 It penetrated the ivy-covered walls of the traditional institutions as well as the glass-and-stainless-steel structures of the newly established colleges.
A consciousness of leadership, a sense of destiny have given maturity and dedication to this generation of Negro students which have few precedents. As a minister, I am often given promises of dedication. Instinctively I examine the degree of sincerity. The striking quality in Negro students I have met is the intensity and depth of their commitment. I am no longer surprised to meet attractive, stylishly dressed young girls whose charm and personality would grace a Junior Prom and to hear them declare in unmistakably sincere terms, “Dr. King, I am ready to die if I must.”
Many of the students when pressed to express their inner feelings, identify themselves with students in Africa, Asia and South America.7 The liberation struggle in Africa has been the greatest single international influence on American Negro students. Frequently I hear them say that if their African brothers can break the bonds of colonialism, surely the American Negro can break Jim Crow.
African leaders such as President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Governor General Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Dr. Tom Mboya of Kenya and Dr. Hastings Banda of Nyasaland are popular heroes on most Negro college campuses.8 Many groups demonstrated or otherwise protested when the Congo leader, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated. The newspapers were mistaken when they interpreted these outbursts of indignation as “Communist-inspired.”9
Part of the impatience of Negro youth stems from their observation that change is taking place rapidly in Africa and other parts of the world, but comparatively slowly in the South. When the United States Supreme Court handed down its historic desegregation decision in 1954, many of us, perhaps naively, thought that great and sweeping school integration would ensue. Yet, today, seven years later, only 7 per cent of the Negro children of the South have been placed in desegregated schools.10 At the current rate it will take ninety-three more years to desegregate the public schools of the South. The collegians say, “We can’t wait that long” or simply, “We won’t wait!”11
Negro students are coming to understand that education and learning have become tools for shaping the future and not devices of privilege for an exclusive few. Behind this spiritual explosion is the shattering of a material atom.
The future of the Negro college student has long been locked within the narrow walls of limited opportunity. Only a few professions could be practiced by Negroes and, but for a few exceptions, behind barriers of segregation in the North as well as the South. Few frustrations can compare with the experience of struggling with complex academic subjects, straining to absorb concepts which may never be used, or only half-utilized under conditions insulting to the trained mind.
A Negro interne blurted out to me shortly after his patient died, “I wish I were not so well trained because then I would never know how many of these people need not die for lack of proper equipment, adequate post-operative care and timely admission.12 I’m not practicing good medicine. I’m presiding over tragedies which the absence of good medicine creates.”
The Negro lawyer knows his practice will bulk large with criminal cases. The law of wills, of corporations, of taxation will only infrequently reach his office because the clientele he serves has had little opportunity to accumulate property. In his courtroom experience in the South, his clients and witnesses will probably be segregated and he, as well as they, will seldom be referred to as “Mister.” Even worse, all too often he knows that the verdict was sealed the moment the arrest was made.13
These are but a few examples of the real experience of the Negro professional, seen clearly by the student who has been asked to study with serious purpose. Obviously his incentive has been smothered and weakened. But today, more than ever, the Negro realizes that, while studying, he can also act to change the conditions which cripple his future. In the struggle to desegregate society he is altering it directly for himself as well as for future generations.
There is another respect in which the Negro student is benefiting, and simultaneously contributing to, society as a whole. He is learning social responsibility; he is learning to earn, through his own direct sacrifice, the result he seeks. There are those who would make him soft, pliable and conformist—a mechanical organization man or an uncreative status seeker. But the experience of Negro youth is as harsh and demanding as that of the pioneer on the untamed frontier. Because his struggle is complex, there is no place in it for the frivolous or rowdy. Knowledge and discipline are as indispensable as courage and self-sacrifice. Hence the forging of priceless qualities of character is taking place daily as a high moral goal is pursued.
Inevitably there will emerge from this caldron a mature man, experienced in life’s lessons, socially aware, unafraid of experimentation and, most of all, imbued with the spirit of service and dedication to a great ideal. The movement therefore gives to its participants a double education—academic learning from books and classes, and life’s lessons from responsible participation in social action. Indeed, the answer to the quest for a more mature, educated American to compete successfully with the young people of other lands, may be present in this new movement.14
Of course, not every student in our struggle has gained from it. This would be more than any humanly designed plan could realize. For some, the opportunity for personal advantage presented itself and their character was not equal to the challenge. A small percentage of students have found it convenient to escape from their own inadequacies by identifying with the sit-ins and other activities.15 They are, however, relatively few because this is the form of escape in which the flight from responsibility imposes even greater responsibilities and risks.16
It is not a solemn life, for all of its seriousness. During a vigorous debate among a group of students discussing the moral and practical soundness of nonviolence, a majority rejected the employment of force. As the minority dwindled to a single student, he finally declared, “All I know is that, if rabbits could throw rocks, there would be fewer hunters in the forest.”
This is more than a witty remark to relieve the tensions of serious and even grim discussion. It expresses some of the pent-up impatience, some of the discontent and some of the despair produced by minute corrections in the face of enormous evil. Students necessarily have conflicting reactions.17 It is understandable that violence presents itself as a quick, effective answer for a few.
For the large majority, however, nonviolent, direct action has emerged as the better and more successful way out. It does not require that they abandon their discontent. This discontent is a sound, healthy social response to the injustice and brutality they see around them. Nonviolence offers a method by which they can fight the evil with which they cannot live. It offers a unique weapon which, without firing a single bullet, disarms the adversary.18 It exposes his moral defenses, weakens his morale, and at the same time works on his conscience.19
Another weapon which Negro students have employed creatively in their nonviolent struggle is satire. It has enabled them to avoid corrosive anger while pressing the cutting edge of ridicule against the opponent. When they have been admonished to “go slow,” patiently to wait for gradual change, with a straight face they will assure you that they are diligently searching for the happy medium between the two extremes of moderation and gradualism.
It is perhaps the special quality of nonviolent direct action, which sublimates anger, that explains why so few students are attracted to extreme nationalist sects advocating black supremacy.20 The students have anger under controlling bonds of discipline. Hence they can answer appeals for cooling-off periods by advocating cooling-off for those who are hot with anger and violence.21
Much has been made of the willingness of these devotees of nonviolent social action to break the law.22 Paradoxically, although they have embraced Thoreau’s and Gandhi’s civil disobedience on a scale dwarfing any past experience in American history, they do respect law.23 They feel a moral responsibility to obey just laws. But they recognize that there are also unjust laws.
From a purely moral point of view, an unjust law is one that is out of harmony with the moral law of the universe. More concretely, an unjust law is one in which the minority is compelled to observe a code that is not binding on the majority. An unjust law is one in which people are required to obey a code that they had no part in making because they were denied the right to vote.
In disobeying such unjust laws, the students do so peacefully, openly and nonviolently. Most important, they willingly accept the penalty, whatever it is, for in this way the public comes to re-examine the law in question and will thus decide whether it uplifts or degrades man.
This distinguishes their position on civil disobedience from the “uncivil disobedience” of the segregationist. In the face of laws they consider unjust, the racists seek to defy, evade and circumvent the law, and they are unwilling to accept the penalty. The end result of their defiance is anarchy and disrespect for the law. The students, on the other hand, believe that he who openly disobeys a law, a law conscience tells him is unjust, and then willingly accepts the penalty, gives evidence thereby that he so respects that law that he belongs in jail until it is changed. Their appeal is to the conscience.
Beyond this, the students appear to have perceived what an older generation overlooked in the role of law. The law tends to declare rights—it does not deliver them. A catalyst is needed to breathe life experience into a judicial decision by the persistent exercise of the rights until they become usual and ordinary in human conduct. They have offered their energies, their bodies to effect this result. They see themselves the obstetricians at the birth of a new order. It is in this manner that the students have related themselves to and materialized “the idea whose time has come.”
In a sense, the victories of the past two years have been spectacular and considerable. Because of the student sitters, more than 150 cities in the South have integrated their lunch counters. Actually, the current break-throughs have come about partly as a result of the patient legal, civil and social ground clearing of the previous decades.24 Then, too, but slowly, the national Government is realizing that our so-called domestic race relations are a major force in our foreign relations. Our image abroad reflects our behavior at home.25
Many liberals, of the North as well as the South, when they list the unprecedented progress of the past few years, yearn for a “cooling off” period; not too fast, they say, we may lose all that we have gained if we push faster than the violent ones can be persuaded to yield.
This view, though understandable, is a misreading of the goals of the young Negroes. They are not after “mere tokens” of integration (“tokenism,” they call it); rather theirs is a revolt against the whole system of Jim Crow and they are prepared to sit-in, kneel-in, wade-in and stand-in until every waiting room, rest room, theatre and other facility throughout the nation that is supposedly open to the public is in fact open to Negroes, Mexicans, Indians, Jews or what-have-you. Theirs is total commitment to this goal of equality and dignity. And for this achievement they are prepared to pay the costs—whatever they are—in suffering and hardship as long as may be necessary.
Indeed, these students are not struggling for themselves alone. They are seeking to save the soul of America. They are taking our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In sitting down at the lunch counters, they are in reality standing up for the best in the American dream. They courageously go to the jails of the South in order to get America out of the dilemma in which she finds herself as a result of the continued existence of segregation. One day historians will record this student movement as one of the most significant epics of our heritage.
But should we, as a nation, sit by as spectators when the social unrest seethes? Most of us recognize that the Jim Crow system is doomed. If so, would it not be the wise and human thing to abolish the system surely and swiftly? This would not be difficult, if our national Government would exercise its full powers to enforce Federal laws and court decisions and do so on a scale commensurate with the problems and with an unmistakable decisiveness.26 Moreover, we would need our religious, civic and economic leaders to mobilize their forces behind a real, honest-to-goodness “End Jim Crow Now” campaign.
This is the challenge of these young people to us and our ideals. It is also an expression of their new-found faith in themselves as well as in their fellow man.27
In an effort to understand the students and to help them understand themselves, I asked one student I know to find a quotation expressing his feeling of our struggle. He was an inarticulate young man, athletically expert and far more poetic with a basketball than with words, but few would have found the quotation he typed on a card and left on my desk early one morning:
I sought my soul, but my soul
I could not see,
I sought my God, but he eluded
me,
I sought my brother, and I
found all three.28
1. A 10 January 1956 Montgomery Advertiser profile on minister Robert S. Graetz included a quote from an elderly boycotter: “Well, my body may be a bit tired, but for many years now my soul has been tired. Now my soul is resting” (Tom Johnson, “The Mechanics of the Bus Boycott”). King later attributed the quote to Mother Pollard (Strength to Love [New York: Harper & Row, 1963], p. 116).
2. Victor Hugo, The History of a Crime: Deposition of a Witness (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1877), p. 429.
3. King wrote this article likely with the help of Stanley Levison (Dora E. McDonald to Levison, 17 May 1961; McDonald to King, 2 August 1961). The first draft of King’s article that is deposited at Morehouse College [MCMLK-RWWL] included the following sentence: “He is different in quality and degree from other college youth” (King, Draft, The Time for Freedom has Come, July 1961).
4. Following the first Montgomery sit-in on 25 February 1960, Alabama governor John Malcolm Patterson pressured Alabama State College president H. Councill Trenholm to expel the thirty-five student protesters. In response, on 1 March, about one thousand students from Alabama State marched to the State Capitol (Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, “The Montgomery Situation,” April 1960). For more on the Alabama State College demonstrations, see Introduction and King to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 9 March 1960, in Papers 5:24–25 and 385–387, respectively.
5. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), p. 811.
6. In March 1960, the National Student Association (NSA), with chapters in over four hundred universities nationwide, expressed support for the sit-in movement and coordinated sympathy protests targeting department stores such as Woolworth’s in northern cities. Fourteen months later, the NSA endorsed nationwide demonstrations in support of the Freedom Rides at Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals. The NSA also endorsed the Peace Corps and called for the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
7. King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL] included these additional sentences: “They are keenly aware that in the liberation struggles of these countries students have been social levers which have overturned governments, altered the compositions of legislatures and frequently entered high office to implement new policies and programs. Our students want deeply to influence their world particularly because they find themselves heading a struggle to win democratic rights for themselves which became the property of other Americans one hundred and seventy-five years ago. In this respect, they find similarities in their circumstances with the students in historically deprived and under-developed lands.”
8. At the invitation of Nkrumah, King attended Ghana’s independence celebrations in 1957 and was present for Azikiwe’s 1960 inauguration as governor-general of Nigeria. Mboya, a prominent politician and labor activist in Kenya, visited King in 1959, while on a five-week tour of the United States. For more on King’s relationships with Nkrumah, Mboya, and Azikiwe, see Introductions in Papers 4:7–10 and Papers 5:16, 40. Banda was the leader of an independence movement that created the state of Malawi in 1966; he served as president of Malawi until 1994.
9. Lumumba was the leader of the movement that resulted in the Congo’s independence from Belgium in June 1960; but he was overthrown soon after in a military coup and killed on 17 January 1961. Various pro-Lumumba demonstrations worldwide occurred after Congo officials announced his death on 13 February. In New York, African American demonstrators stormed the United Nations in protest and were dispersed by police. According to the New York Times, several United States officials “asserted that Communist agitators had stirred up the pro-Lumumba demonstrations” (“Riot in Gallery Halts U.N. Debate,” 16 February 1961).
10. The Southern Education Reporting Service, a nonpartisan agency, reported that 6.9 percent of Negroes were enrolled in previously all-white schools at the end of the 1960–1961 school year (“7.3 Per Cent Negro Students in Dixie Schools,” Chicago Daily Defender, 11 December 1961).
11. In a second draft of this article, from the King Center [MLKJP-GAMK], King included the following paragraph: “This manifest impatience is even deeper than that. Its roots are in the very nature of the revolt of Negro youth. The obvious fight is against racial segregation, the mass of laws and custons, the humiliation of black by white. The more subtle [strikeout illegible] struggle is against authority, in all of its forms—black, white, individual and institutional. Not only are white policemen and mayors and governors often looked upon as ‘natural enemies’ but these same young people have strong feelings against Negro college presidents and deans, who are overly conservative yet domineering and parents who are ‘always telling us what to do!’ So strong is this rebellion against adult authority that leaders of the NAACP, Core CORE and my own organization, SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), occasionally find our advice rejected mainly, it appears to us, because the young people want to make their own decisions. As one of them put it: ‘let us make some of the mistakes.’”
12. King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL] included a slightly different version of this sentence: “A Negro intern in an all too typical Negro hospital blurted out to me his bitter fury shortly after his patient died in these words.”
13. King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL] included an additional sentence: “Justice is violated hourly and daily in the south so openly and notoriously that the attorney for the defendent is degraded by his participation in the farcical proceedings.”
14. King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL] included the following additional paragraph: “A persistent question is put by many wondering if the distraction of social action does not militate against serious fruitful study. This legitimate question was answered by one student I know in an interesting way. This bright young man had always affected a cynical attitude toward grades. If he did poorly or failed a subject he was quick to find the joke or remark that deflected attention from it. As a defense mechanism he prided himself on the scope and sophistication of his dating and drinking. One evening he came to me startled and with a curious mixture of flippancy and concern stated, ‘I’m becoming a scholar in spite of myself. I can’t give them any excuse for expelling me now that I’m in the movement, so I’ve put some fast system in my study and it works. The books used to keep secrets from me but now I know what’s in them and I it’s pretty embarrassing when I hear myself sound like a grind. But I’ll do anything for this fight—even study.’”
15. In King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL] the above two sentences were reversed and followed by this additional sentence: “Others have abandoned their studies and pretended they were sacrificing themselves.”
16. The following sentence appeared in both drafts [MCMLK-RWWL and MLKJP-GAMK] of King’s article: “The demands of the student movement are heavy. Discipline, alertness, sacrifice and danger are all involved and the student who enters weak in any quality faces the iron necessity to remake himself or risks disgracing himself.”
17. King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL]: “Their learning has enabled them to understand that merely six {seven} percent of the Negro children have been placed in desegregated schools after nearly one hundred years of legal emancipation and after seven years of a Supreme Court decision. They know, if white students do not, that 43% of Negro families earn less than $2,000.00 per year. These facts and others sum up for them the failure of the nation and the emptiness of the ‘American Dream.’ Hence while they hope and work, they must struggle with the weight of frustration and disappointment.”
18. King’s drafts [MCMLK-RWWL and MLKJP-GAMK]: “It has demonstrated that when sacrifice and courage enable the unarmed and non-violent to take up a position, the guns of the city and state police are seldom used lest the wrath of the whole nation disarm and defeat them. Indeed the experience of the Freedom Riders has shown that the sense of fair play of the American people demands that law enforcement agencies protect, rather than assault, non-violent demonstraters.”
19. In his draft [MLKJP-GAMK], King handwrote this sentence.
20. King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL] indicated that students were “attracted to Muslim or other extreme nationalist sects advocating black supremacy.”
21. On 24 May Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called for a suspension of the Freedom Rides, but failed to persuade the riders (“Attorney General’s Pleas,” New York Times, 25 May 1961). King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL] included an additional sentence: “They consider themselves, in the words of their current vernacular, ‘cool cats for change.’”
22. This sentence does not appear in King’s first draft [MCMLK-RWWL], but is included in the second draft [MLKJP-GAMK].
23. King’s draft [MCMLK-RWWL] includes the following sentence: “The immature outbursts of conflict with town police or raids on girl’s dormitories which now herald spring on the campus in many college communities are unknown on the Negro campus as they calmly and carefully plan a lunch counter sit-in or a bus ride.” His second draft [MLKJP-GAMK] contains the following addition, but it is also partially crossed out: “I quite agree with their willingness to break Jim Crow laws—or any law that degrades man. This is not at all irresponsible lawlessness; rather, it shows a high respect for law that benefits man. When they violate laws, unlike the {‘uncivil disobedience’ of the} segregationist, they are willing to suffer the consequences of their acts. They do not run and hide. They are quite willing to endure the penalities, whatever they are, for in this way the public comes to re-examine the law in question and will thus decide whether it uplifts or downgrades man. Their appeal is to conscience. The pointless outbursts of conflict with town police or raids on girl’s dormitories which now herald spring on the campus in many college communities are unknown on the Negro campus as they calmly and carefully plan a lunch counter sit-in or a bus ride.”
24. King’s draft [MLKJP-GAMK]: “Moreover, the South, as ‘backward’ as it may appear when the riots break out, is much more enlightened today than it was say, twenty-five years ago. Also, it is more prosperous, urbanized and industrialized.”
25. Robert F. Kennedy’s 24 May statement urging a suspension of the Freedom Rides also included the plea to “keep in mind that the President is about to embark on a mission of great importance. Whatever we do in the United States at this time which brings or causes discredit on our country can be harmful to his mission” (“Attorney General’s Pleas,” 25 May 1961).
26. King discussed a number of ways executive power could be used to end segregation in an earlier essay for The Nation (“Equality Now,” 4 February 1961, pp. 139–150 in this volume).
27. The preceding four paragraphs were not in King’s first draft [MCMLK-RWWL].
28. “The Search,” by Ernest Howard Crosby (1899): “No one could tell me where my Soul might be./I searched for God, but God eluded me. /I sought my Brother out, and found all three” (Crosby, “The Search,” in Plain Talk in Psalm & Parable [Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1899], p. 137). King admitted later that “I do not know the author of the poem that I quoted at the end of the article. I have always liked it, and I have used it many times in speeches. For some reason, I have never come across the author” (King to B. S. Weiss, 5 October 1961).
Source: New York Times Magazine, 10 September 1961, pp. 25, 118–119.