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The quote is often attributed to Martin Luther King, who used the quote in several speeches, though King quoted it from the nineteenth century abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker.
Often as I’ve interviewed people about what gives them hope about the future of race in America, this quote comes up. There’s something very comforting in believing that whatever we experience now, if we wait long enough, eventually it’s going to come around right.
But it’s worth paying attention to how we often use—or misuse—that quote. In the context of speeches where King used the quote and based on what else he wrote, it’s clear that he didn’t think justice would just happen upon us if we waited long enough (and neither did Parker in his original use of the phrase).
In his letter from a Birmingham jail, King takes pains to dispel that very myth. He calls it the myth of time.
King spends some paragraphs responding to a letter in which a white man told him, “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually.” King counters:
He’s describing an important shift in how we might hope—from hoping with hands politely folded in patience, toward hoping with our hands and feet on the move. For King, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice not because it just happens to do so, but because people can become creative, active co-workers with each other and with God. King’s hope was not that “time will heal all wounds,” but that we choose to be among the healers.
From a jail cell sixty years ago, King lamented that he had “hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time.” Will you?
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