Why We Can’t Wait

In his fourth book, titled “Why We Can’t Wait,” Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., gave his observations of the events of the Civil Rights revolution during the Birmingham campaign of 1963. Dr. King surmised that in 1963, Negroes in America began a revolution for justice.

However, in the chapter of his book, titled “The Summer of our Discontent,” Dr. King recalled that twenty-five years prior to his book, one of the “southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation.

The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis…”

The words of this young man are haunting and troubles me on many levels. Dr. King used this episode to point out that in 1963, “Negroes in America did not call Joe Louis for help, but discovered the fighting spirit, and the power each had within himself. Voluntarily facing death in many places, they have relied on their own united ranks for strength and protection.”

Yet, in the year 2024, I wonder if many oppressed Black citizens have reverted back to calling on or seeing help coming from some notable celebrity rather than God or in particular the church of Jesus Christ?

I know that someone reading this will retort that they call on God for help, but here is the issue, God, according to the biblical narrative, works through people, groups, and communities of people who gather together because of their belief and faith in God. No prophet, no church planter like Paul and not even Jesus spoke to individuals; they all spoke to the community of Faith. That is why faith in God not connected to other individuals organized to carry out God’s will lacks power.

Dr. King witnessed Black people who stood up to the powers that had long oppressed them because they believed in their own agency as a community and in the “preferential option of God for the poor,” to quote the Latin liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez. That means that God favors those who are destitute and disallowed as a barometer of the morality of any nation or country.

However, with the decline in church attendance and the rise of social media among the masses, the fixation on celebrity culture and the obsession with individuality in order to seek the most fun as in the commercial tag “you only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can,” do oppressed Black and brown people as a whole have the will to produce another movement like the Montgomery Bus boycott that lasted for 381 days?

People willingly sacrificed comfort and convenience for a greater cause. Please watch the movie by the great Clark Johnson “Boycott.” It gives perhaps the best portrayal of the events of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

At this point, I cannot see a movement of Black people giving up convenience and comfort to put pressure on a corporation or the government to treat people justly for three months, and certainly not for 381 days, as it happened in Montgomery, AL.

Why? My reasoning is because white theology has taken a toll on the Black Church. Not all Black churches, but the faith of many Black and brown people in America to see the power and influence of the Black church has either not been taught and preached about or abandoned for “likes, clicks, and trending” clips.

For far too long, white theology has demonized African indigenous religious practices or anything that it did not create.

For far too long, too many Black and brown people have resisted seeing how their biblical literacy and theological perspectives must be married to their political goals, rather than being antagonistic to any preacher or Pastor who has been coined, “preaching politics from the pulpit.”

Jesus’ whole ministry addressed political policies that hurt the poor, be that from the religious aristocracy in Jerusalem or from the puppet government.

For far too long, too many Black people who attend church have acted out of what the late Walter Wink called the “domination system,” of empire. Too many Black church people have adopted a hierarchal systemic form of oppression that ranks men over women, white over Black, rich over poor, married over unmarried or divorced, straight over gay and America over anywhere else.

Because of white theology, far too many people who attend church have operated in their churches out of a spirit of competition rather than cooperation. We have some pastors and church members who will not partner with other churches, either because they are not in the same denomination or because they have become one-issue believers; meaning that all a right-wing political candidate has to do is mention abortion or same gender loving to divide and conquer.

People of faith can be in alignment on 99 issues but allow one issue to keep them from organizing together, as Jesus taught to create a community reminiscent of the Acts 2-4 community of egalitarian equity among people.

Jesus came in the flesh to Northeast Africa, to a community of people being oppressed by the domination system of Europeans from Rome to instill in them that together they had the power because of the God who hates oppression of any kind to change the way the most vulnerable are treated.

Jesus came to demonstrate that God had placed resurrection power in each of us to use collectively for the good of all in the society.

The seventh chapter of Dr. King’s book, “the Summer of Our Discontent,” where that young Black man was used as a guinea pig crying out, “save me, Joe Louis,” still troubles me because I know there are so many who have not been shown the authority they have and the power of God that is within them to resist oppression and create a beloved community as Dr. King believed.

We still have time but time is running tight, because the hounds of Hell are at the door.

Please look up the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” because it will cause a cold shiver to course through your body and soul.

But, I close with the great hymnologist and Pastor the late Charles A. Tindley, who wrote these words to music: “Harder yet maybe the fight, right may often yield to might. Wickedness awhile may reign and Satan’s cause may seem to gain. But there is a God who rules above, with hand of power and heart of Love and if I’m right, He’ll fight my battle. We shall have peace someday.”