We have waited.  For more than 340 years for our
constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia
and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining
political independence, but we stiff creep at
horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a
lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never
felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But
when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and
fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at
whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick
and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see
the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers
smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of
an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue
twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain
to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the
public amusement park that has just been advertised on
television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she
is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see
ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her
little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her
personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward
white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a
five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white
people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a
cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night
after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile
because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated
day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and
"colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your
middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your
last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are
never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are
harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you
are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never
quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with
inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever
fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will
understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a
time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no
longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I
hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and
unavoidable impatience.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to
break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since
we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's
decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public
schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for
us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: "How can you
advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer
lies in the fact that there fire two types of laws: just
and unjust. I would be the Brat to advocate obeying just
laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility
to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral
responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree with
St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in
Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom
fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to
aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am
sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have
aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in
a Communist country where certain principles dear to the
Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate
disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and
Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past
few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white
moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion
that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward
freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux
Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to
"order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which
is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the
presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you
in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods
of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can
set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a
mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the
Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow
understanding from people of good will is more frustrating
than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright
rejection.