As we mark Martin Luther King Day, let us remember the man by considering one of his most powerful phrases: “the fierce urgency of now.” 

When he declared victory in the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama based his  “Our Moment is Now” speech upon Dr. King's words.  When he endorsed Obama, Edward Kennedy declared that he had “lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now.” 

On August 28, 1963, Dr. King delivered these words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in his most famous speech, “I Have A Dream.”  After looking back at the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Declaration of Independence and before sharing his dream for the future, Dr. King spoke of the present moment, saying: 

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. 

He used repetition to drive home the urgency of the moment:  

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.  

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.  

Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.  

Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. 

As Coretta Scott King later recalled, “When he got to the rhythmic part of demanding freedom now, . . . the crowd caught the timing and shouted ‘now’ in a cadence.”   

Even today, when you listen to a recording of his address, you still can hear the echo of the audience responding to Dr. King’s repeated refrain that “now is the time.”    

On April 4, 1967, in his address “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” Dr. King spoke further about the “fierce urgency of now.”

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.” 

Dr. King’s emphasis on the urgency of the present was not unique.  Shortly before Dr. King spoke at the march on Washington, John Lewis, then Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, said:

To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that “patience” is a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now. 

What was different was the enduring power of Dr. King’s phrase.  Although the words were his own, Dr. King may have built the phase “the fierce urgency of now” upon the language of a fellow minister with whom he was familiar. 

Reuben Emmanuel Nelson (1905-1960) was the General Secretary of the American Baptist Convention of 1950 through 1959.  As General Secretary, he had issued an open letter inviting Baptists, regardless of race, to join in fellowship with the American Baptist Convention -- an offer that Dr. King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church accepted in 1962, when it voted to affiliate with the Convention.   

We know that Dr. King knew Reuben Nelson.  Under Nelson’s leadership, the American Baptist Convention contributed $900 towards the trip that Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King took to India in February and March, 1959, where Dr. King studied Gandhi’s teachings and methods.  On March 23, 1959, Dr. King wrote Reuben Nelson a letter (collected in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.), thanking him and the Convention for their generosity. 

Nelson himself wrote a “Prayer for Guidance” (published in 1961 in Reuben E. Nelson: Free Churchman by Robert George Torbet and Henry R. Bowler).  In it, Nelson asks to “Give me the confidence to know My will in Thine,” declaring that “He knows the urgency of ‘now.’” 

Did Dr. King know Nelson’s Prayer for Guidance?  Was it a source upon which Dr. King drew when he spoke of the urgency of now?  We do not know; the answer may be lost to the mists of time.  But we do know and still can feel the punch that the phrase packs.