<em>Patience</em> Is a Dirty Word

John Lewis planned to open his March on Washington speech declaring SNCC’s opposition to President John F. Kennedy’s civil-rights bill, which was weak on police brutality. He ended up declaring SNCC’s tepid support. And his call for a “serious revolution” was changed to a call for a “social revolution.”

Lewis called for immediate equality, challenging both the calls for gradual equality and the resurgent calls for permanent inequality in 1963. In January, eight months before the March on Washington, Alabama Governor George Wallace had declared, during his inaugural address: “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

John Lewis: Photos from a life spent getting into good trouble

Permanent inequality, gradual equality, and immediate equality: This triangle of racial thought formed during slavery. Back then, there were three main policy positions on slavery: permanent enslavement, gradual emancipation, and immediate emancipation. By the 1820s, antislavery Americans were typically advocating for gradual emancipation (and for colonizing emancipated Black people out of the United States). At the American Colonization Society’s Fourth of July gathering in Boston in 1829, William Lloyd Garrison called on all residents of the free states “to demand a gradual abolition of slavery.”

Ten days later, Garrison, a young white newspaper editor, sat in a Black Baptist church and witnessed a celebration of the anniversary of England’s abolition of the slave trade. When a white clergyman preached about abolition being neither wise nor safe without a long period qualifying Black people for freedom, “a very audible murmur ran round the house,” Garrison remembered.

Boston’s Black abolitionists at the time, such as Maria Stewart, were calling for nothing less than freedom, or immediate emancipation. They knew from experience how gradual-emancipation policies prolonged slavery, effectively prolonging the status quo.

After the American Revolution, most northern states passed gradual-emancipation laws that left some Black people enslaved for decades. For example, hundreds of Black Americans were still enslaved in Pennsylvania in 1850, 70 years after the state passed its Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.