response to "Why Can't We Wait"

After reading Martin Luther King's, Why Can't We Wait, I noticed that some statements he makes about racial discrimination are similar to some of the other pieces we have read about. When King writes about the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, he says that "all the talk and publicity accompanying the centennial only served to remind the Negro that he still wasn't free, that he stilled lived a form of slavery disguised by certain niceties of complexity."(pg. 12). This reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates', Between the World and Me, because what King says in that quote explains what Coates is writing about in his Book. Although King's book was written in 1963, and Coates was written in 2015, this problem still occurs in the world today. King states "today-especially in the southern half of the nation-armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro"(pg. 20). This also correlates to, Between the World and Me, when Coates talks about the murder of Prince Jones. He writes "I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth"(pg. 76). In conclusion, King and Coates have similar mind sets on the way society was on racism during 1963, and also to this day. Although King praises the strategies that have been put in place for the past decades to try and free negroes, he knows that it will take a lot of time. While that time is still upon us, a big concern that King and Coates write about is that no African American is safe is the society we live in.

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