Minneapolis, Minn., and Birmingham, Ala., are far apart in many ways. But the slim volume Why We Can’t Wait by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most insightful works of political philosophy ever penned, shows how these cities share a story of suffering and prompt a question of conscience for Americans today.

Then: King and Birmingham

The year 1963 was momentous in its tragedy and progress. Protesting racial segregation in Birmingham, Black Americans on April 3 launched sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, marched on City Hall, and orchestrated a boycott of businesses in downtown Birmingham. This effort was led by Dr. King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

King documented this “non-violent direct action” and its consequences in Why We Can’t Wait. According to King, the protest led to an agreement on May 10 with local business leaders to desegregate Birmingham, but the implementation of this agreement faltered. Then, in September, four young Black girls were killed in the bombing of a Birmingham church. These events galvanized the Black community and its allies across the nation. More than 200,000 people demonstrated in the March on Washington in August 1963, and the momentum from the civil rights movement helped to produce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Why We Can’t Wait merited attention then and ever after. King’s parting words stun the reader as a concise, timely and pressing assessment of human history. He writes: “Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of human existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.” 

As to his audience, King had in mind the civil rights advocates who would not take “wait a little longer” for an answer. He said that their action must be nonviolent to be successful. But he also understood peace as the responsibility and proper inheritance of all. Few with lived experience and the responsibility to raise the next generation could argue with either King’s understanding of the past or his sentiments for what we all long for in the future: peace.

Now: The siege of Minneapolis

King’s work has still more to offer Americans today, especially as we watch and live through the crackdown on immigrants by the Trump administration in Minnesota in 2026.

Yes, we should acknowledge differences. At issue then were Jim Crow laws that demeaned, deprived and disenfranchised Black Americans whose citizenship was not in doubt. Today the quest is to detain and deport immigrants who are undocumented or whose protected legal status is no longer considered valid by the Trump administration.

Also striking are the diametrically opposed roles of federal law enforcement. While Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson readied and sometimes used federal troops in places like Arkansas and Alabama to enforce civil rights and protect those who protested segregation, President Trump has deployed ICE and threatened the use of the Insurrection Act to apply similar military forces to punish minorities in our community and to suppress the right to protest.

The stories of tragic suffering in Minnesota are growing. For example, on Jan. 20, ICE detained Andrian Alexander Conejo Arias and his 5-year-old son, Liam Conejo Ramos. While narratives of the detainment differ, the Conejo Ramos family’s lawyer says that both are here legally from Ecuador with an asylum case pending. Even so, ICE removed them from their home in Minnesota and now hold them in a detention center in Texas.

And on Jan. 7, an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a U.S. citizen who was monitoring and protesting the actions of immigration officials. On Jan. 24, ICE agents also killed Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and an American citizen who appeared to film an ICE operation and assisted an injured bystander.

We must recognize a fundamental correspondence between Birmingham in 1963 and Minnesota in 2026, and the broader experience each represents. In both cases, those initially targeted for punishment are people of color who are already victims of oppression of one form or another (Jim Crow laws, gang violence, abject poverty, vilification). In both cases, most are valued members of their American families and communities and are innocent of any serious wrongdoing, yet they are forced to live in the shadows of menacing authorities (local police then, federal law enforcement now).

Were King with us today, he no doubt would see and highlight the connection. In Why We Can’t Wait, King observes:

For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated…. The strands of prejudice toward Negroes are tightly wound around the American character. The prejudice has been nourished by the doctrine of race inferiority…. Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race…. It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth.

The social landscape of America, shaped by the white settlers’ claim to racial superiority, proved a fertile soil for the eradication of tribal nations, the importation of slavery and then the creation of Jim Crow—immoral and indefensible practices rooted in ethnic discrimination.

While the civil rights movement forced Americans to face this heinous “doctrine of race inferiority” and to take steps to remedy its harmful lived consequences, it by no means eliminated ingrained racial prejudice. King would have understood and called out the Trump administration’s effort to persecute immigrants through ICE’s racial profiling and militarized tactics as a new manifestation of America’s original sin.

While the Trump administration may claim to target only unauthorized immigrants, the reality is otherwise, as cases like that of the Conejo Ramos family show. What is more, the Trump administration’s social media practices promote an America that makes room—primarily, if not only—for white people. This vision ignores complex historical realities and rejects inclusive practices like immigration that produce a diverse society.

Where do we go from here?

So what’s next? How will the American conscience process President Trump’s immigration policy, as imposed most recently on Minnesota, and residents’ resistance to it?

We can again look to King, who saw the world through the eyes of a Christian. When he marched in Birmingham, was jailed and then wrote his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” the centerpiece of Why We Can’t Wait, he answered the critics who maligned him as an “extremist” with a list of admirable extremists whose ideas form the intellectual foundation of the United States—Socrates, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, among others. 

But arguably most important for King were Jesus and Paul, the founders of Christianity. Theirs was a brand of radical inclusion that transcended ethnic lines. Jesus healed Jews, Romans and Syrians. Paul was an apostle to the Gentiles. Whatever the political laws at any one moment (laws can be temporarily unjust and in need of reformulation), Christian teaching demands radical inclusion.

King, as a Christian, was compelled to make the following judgments of people of faith in 1963. He wrote, once again from his Birmingham jail cell, “I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate.” In fact, he nearly concluded that the “great stumbling block” for Black Americans in the civil rights movement was not groups like the Ku Klux Klan but “the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice.” He further predicted, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” While Black Americans and some white allies suffered in the fight for civil rights, King wondered how so many white American Christians could accept segregation.

For one who embraces a Christian life today, or indeed a life anchored in any creed that celebrates human dignity and the morality it requires, a similar question looms large: How can the Trump administration’s actions in Minnesota be acceptable?

These actions read as racist and at odds with the dignity common to all human beings. In a society that often lauds Christian principles, the present moment offers a paradox demanding an answer. For King, those who sat in the pews but remained on the bench, refusing to positively endorse or support the civil rights movement, were a disappointment. Theirs was a shallow Christianity, and Why We Can’t Wait is the full and compelling case that supports this assessment. King insisted on the importance of public nonviolent protest to advocate for victims of injustice. Such protest was—and is—a protected right in the democracy that is the United States. Those who stand in the streets of Minnesota today stand in this tradition.

The question at this moment is how they—and the immigrants and people of color they support—will ultimately be received by their fellow Americans. To what extent will Americans today fall short when facing a test like that of Birmingham in 1963?

The application of federal forces against so many hard-working Americans of color and their families, law-abiding as a rule except for the decision to cross over into the United States, driven by dire need and in a quest for a good life, is a grand hypocrisy that calls into question the character of the American people. Do we practice a selective morality, detached from lived realities and anchored in self-concern? Or will we devote ourselves to building a more inclusive America, a place where we value the human beings in our midst with a generosity that surpasses ethnic lines, an orientation surely more in the spirit of Jesus and Paul?

Why We Can’t Wait is a book calling for a collective self-examination of the American conscience that still finds a place in 2026. It remains for us to write the next chapter.

Jason Schlude is a professor of classics and history at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University and the founding director of the Humanities Institute at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University.

Jason Schlude is a professor of classics and history at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University and the founding director of the Humanities Institute at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University.