Tuesday Intros No. 2: Why We Can't Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Welcome to First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday Intros,

hosted by Diane @

Bibliophile By The Sea!!

Every Tuesday, each participant
shares the first paragraph 

(sometimes two) from a book
they're reading,

or thinking about reading.

The book I've picked this week is....

Why We Can't Wait
Martin Luther King, Jr. 
Trade Paperback, 182 pages
Beacon Press
January 11, 2011
African-American Studies,  American History,  Classics, Civil Rights Movement,  
Nonfiction, Politics, Social Justice 

About the Book
  
Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963

Often applauded as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most incisive and eloquent book, Why We Can’t Wait recounts the Birmingham campaign in vivid detail, while underscoring why 1963 was such a crucial year for the civil rights movement. During this time, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States, but the campaign launched by Fred Shuttlesworth, King, and others demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action. King examines the history of the civil rights struggle and the tasks that future generations must accomplish to bring about full equality. The book also includes the extraordinary “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which King wrote in April of 1963.




Introduction

It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963.

I see a young Negro boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a family on Long Island.

I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in Birmingham. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother.She can no longer attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood because her mother died only recently after a car accident. Neighbors say if the ambulance hadn't come so late to take her to the all-Negro hospital the mother might still be alive. 

 

I have just finished reading this powerful,
moving book, which is one that every
American, whatever their race or
ethnic group, should read. Dr. King writes 
in a sober, eloquent manner about the
horrible injustices of segregation in
the society of his time. Reading this book  
reminds us all that we  still
have a ways to go to achieve full equality.    

Have you ever read this classic?

If so, what did you think?

If not, has the selection above
enticed you to do so?

I would love to know!