From Martin Luther King, April 28, 1965, at the Davenport Catholic Interracial Council’s Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award banquet. Tim Cook referenced this in a commencement speech he gave at George Washington University. I went rummaging on the web for the whole.

One is what I refer to as the myth of time. This is the notion that only time can solve the problem, and there are those who say to the Negro and his allies in the white community: “Now don’t push things, you ought to cool off and be nice and patient because only time can solve this problem, and if you will wait 100 to 200 years, time will work it out.”

Well I think there is an answer to this myth, and it is that time is neutral: it can be used either constructively or destructively, and I say to you very honestly tonight, my friends, that I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the forces committed to negative ends in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will and it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people who would bomb a church in Birmingham, Ala., but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.”

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability but comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must help time and we must realize that the time is always ripe to do right and this is the way we can get rid of a dangerous myth that is loose in our society.

Dr. King went on to speak of a second myth, “…that legislation can’t solve this problem. You’ve heard that – they’ve said to us that we must change the heart and legislation can’t change the heart.”

This gave me an ah-ha moment as I read on.

Now the answer that I would give to that is that it may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law may not change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me—and I think that this is pretty important also.

So while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men, and when you change the habits of men, pretty soon hearts of men will begin to change and attitudes will begin to change.

So, we must legislate and state clearly what our ideals and goals are as well as what behaviors are not acceptable in our society. And then, we must use the time while people are adapting to the new behaviors, to change their hearts. That must be part of the plan for change too.

The work is not done. It must continue.