By Marian Wright Edelman
The week honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in our nation ended under a barrage of threats to Dr. King’s vision and values and attacks on long-deserved, hard-earned protections and progress for millions of people. It is a shameful moment. But it is also a moment to return to something Dr. King taught again and again over the years: progress against forces of regression can never be taken for granted, and will always rely on the hard work of committed, creative, faithful people who never lose sight of where the end will be.
Dr. King wrote this down in these words in his seminal Letter from Birmingham Jail, as he countered “the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills”: “Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill-will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”
Dr. King repeated variations of this admonishment in a number of other sermons, speeches, and essays before and after Birmingham. He included it in several addresses on college campuses, making sure its truth was underscored for young people. In another speech he phrased it this way: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a casual look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social destruction. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”
Dr. King also repeated the same words in Letter from Birmingham Jail nearly verbatim in his last Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” given at the Washington National Cathedral on March 31, 1968, four days before he was assassinated. This was a message he never stopped wanting to make sure his listeners heard and internalized.
His words remain both a sobering reminder and a powerful instruction for all who seek to follow him right now. The King Holiday is also a moment when many people repeat another of Dr. King’s most beloved teachings, which he quoted from 19th century abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker—another lesson that Dr. King included again in his final sermon at the Washington National Cathedral, in words that are now engraved on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall:
We shall overcome, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.