“Keep Your Hand on the Plow, and Hold On”
What the People Jailed in 1963 Birmingham Teach Us about Saving America from the SAVE America Act. And from Itself.
Paul and Silas locked in jail. Didn’t have no one to go their bail. Keep your hand on the plow, and hold on. Noah said, “You done lost your track. You can’t plow straight and keep a-looking back.” Keep your hand on the plow, and hold on. Hold on (hold on), hold on (hold on). Keep your hand on that plow, and hold on. — Hold On — Anti-slavery Spiritual and Civil Rights Freedom Song
It was in 1964 that Martin, along with help from people like Bayard Rustin, the person who’d insisted that the Civil Rights movement must, in every way, be both faith-fueled and nonviolent, published Why We Can’t Wait, a rearticulation and further exploration of the arguments laid out in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, the year prior, on April 16, 1963.
That letter was written while Martin and thousands of fellow protestors were crammed into every nook and cranny of Birmingham’s overflowing jailhouse. My mother, Bernice, 13 years old at the time, was among them. She talks about the experience as nothing short of glorious. So much of that was because of the singing, from We Shall Overcome to Hold On.
No one, no one let me come in. Doors are fastened and the windows pinned. Keep your hand on the plow, and hold on. Hold on (hold on), hold on (hold on). Keep your hand on the plow, and hold on.
By the time they were singing it behind bars in the Birmingham Jail, the slavery-era code-phrase “hand on the plow”, which meant staying the course once one had committed one’s self to vying for freedom, no matter how hard things got, had been slightly revised to “eyes on the prize.” Something that often happens with communally written songs. Though the imagery changed, the meaning remained the same – finish what you’d started.
I once saw a man start to go the wrong way across the Golden Gate Bridge. Realizing his error, he tried to back up. “Sir,” the bridge agent said through the loudspeaker, “You have committed yourself to the bridge. Now, go forward.” I’ve always remembered that.
In 1963 Birmingham, everyone incarcerated had committed themselves to the cause, and even children like my mother were determined to go forward. They knew what was at stake, all they were risking by being there. And yet they deemed it worth it. They grasped that, just like in slavery days, the entire societal infrastructure had been built to secure their failure, to break their spirits, to discourage them so severely that they abandoned the plow, took their eyes off the prize.
They understood that justice had not only been deferred but didn’t apply to them, and that there was no reason to believe they’d all leave there alive. Yet, they stood. That’s because they understood a greater reality, that this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to upend that system, to change everything. So, they dug down within their souls and found the wherewithal to do just that.
The Letter from Birmingham Jail is both rationale and rebuttal, a recounting of how a nation of people who’d been repeatedly told they were powerless to change things found their power. How they overcame. They’re a potent example for us today. In the letter, Martin described “Bull Connor’s Birmingham” as an anachronistic city whose social order wasn’t far removed from colonial-era slavery, including the lack of basic human rights for many Birminghamians and the constant violence to which they were subjected and terror they lived under.
Martin understood the dire nature of the threat, suggesting that the campaign centered in Birmingham was, in every way, a revolution. He deemed it analogous to the Battle of Bunker Hill—the moment disparate colonists became a revolutionary army.
Eight clergy had written an anti-demonstration open letter published in the newspaper titled An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense. In it, they stated: “However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel [emphasis added] that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”
Wow. Talk about audacity.
If there was one thing that we did wrong, it was staying in the wilderness too long. Keep your eyes on the prize, and hold on. Hold on (hold on), hold on (hold on). Keep eyes on the prize, and hold on.
Martin, with incredible grace and restraint, responds by saying, “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait,’” before detailing what life was really like for the oppressed, everything from lynch mobs to constant degradation, from abject poverty to persecution. He wanted those advocating that the oppressed “be patient” to understand that they were speaking from a place of luxury.
“When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro,” he continued, “Living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” – then, you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”
But what so many of us miss is that, even back then, the movement wasn’t just about the plight of African Americans. “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” Martin asserted in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.”
This revolution may have started, in earnest, in Birmingham. But it was always intended to be an American movement, one that enabled each of us to forge a nation that stands for all of us out of the ruins of oppression. The thing is, there really does come a moment when we cross the threshold. When the time for waiting really is over, a time when every day we allow ourselves to wait is another day of crimes against humanity. Martin understood this in his bones, calling us, on multiple occasions, to heed the moment. Including in his Beyond Vietnam sermon:
We are now faced with the fact 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 the flood; it ebbs.
We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue 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. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on...’ We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
With everything from a government that’s warehousing immigrants to this administration’s inferences that Native Americans aren’t citizens, from efforts to justify the killing of protesting Americans by claiming that protesting itself is “domestic terrorism” to stripping trans people of personhood and erasing them from history, to, most recently, a president that threatened to utterly annihilate another civilization if they don’t give in to his demands, we’re already in such a time. That’s what I’ve been saying to the contingent of interfaith ministers in the redemptive resistance group I lead, how this, right here, is the moment we’re meant to meet.
If there is one thing that we did right, it was the day we began to fight. Keep your eyes on the prize, and hold on. Hold on (hold on), hold on (hold on). Keep eyes on the prize, and hold on.
In Love Can Build a Bridge, I described how, right now, this administration is applying incredible pressure, desperate to get the SAVE America Act, their last, best hope, passed, with the president going so far as to predict that if they’re successful, ideologically aligned members of Congress are all but guaranteed to be reelected, but that without it, they’re in “big trouble.” And they are.
Parenthetically, a friend of mine recently quipped, “The better the name sounds, the worse the bill is.” He’s right. The Clean Air Act unleashed corporate polluters. Right to Work laws harm workers. The Big, Beautiful Bill turned ICE into a force larger than most of the world’s militaries, and set them loose on our streets. And the SAVE America Act? It’s clearly not America that’s being saved.
The bill’s advocates have continually claimed that only it can protect election integrity despite the evidence from the Heritage Foundation’s own database revealing only 34 documented cases of voter fraud out of billions of ballots cast across the nation, from local to national elections, over the last 50+ years. 34 votes. That’s the outcome of thousands of hours spent trying to find evidence to support their claims that the 2020 election was stolen. But the facts haven’t altered their messaging. Or their tweets.
In reality, what this bill does is prevent members of America’s new, diverse majority, many of whom are at or near the bottom of our nation’s economic pyramid, from voting via a financial technicality. Today’s version of a poll tax.
Then, there’s how President Trump, at a July 2024 rally organized by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, told the crowd, “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
He then reiterated, “I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.” That’s the promise he made to his “beautiful Christians,” that if they’d get out the vote that one last time, they’d never have to do it again. But that’s simply not how democracy works. In fact, that statement, a system “fixed so good” that people no longer have to vote, is the antithesis of democracy. It’s now obvious what having it “fixed so good” looks like. It looks like the SAVE America Act.
And that’s besides the individual states that, despite already having laws requiring that people swear that they’re American citizens and that make non-citizen voting a felony, they’ve gone further, making undeniable proof of citizenship a prerequisite to even registering. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Arizona, Utah, Ohio, Wyoming, and South Dakota – all states with significant African American, Latinx and/or Native American citizens – have passed such laws. And Florida, which is also on the cusp of becoming majority-minority, just passed its own version, which comes into effect on January 1, 2027.
Each is a state where already economically struggling Americans are being disenfranchised. Then, for good measure, they’ve tacked on a mail-in voting moratorium that would diminish voter participation among everyone, from seniors to members of the military to citizens who live hours away from polling stations—e.g., many Native Americans on tribal lands.
Keep on climbing, and don’t you tire. Every rung leads higher and higher. Keep your hand on that plow, and hold on. Hold on (hold on), hold on (hold on). Keep your hand on the plow, and hold on.
The thing is, despite 200 years of oppression dressed up as everything from economic prudence (“We can’t survive without slavery”) to ethnic pride (“Our Race Is Our Nation”) to religious mandate (“Rule the world for God”), the people have kept their hand on the plow. They’ve sown the seeds of democracy and humanity and beloved community. And in doing so, their numbers have grown. For the first time in United States history, they’re the majority. The incumbent powers continue to use the same social wedging and supremacy tools. But because the fundamental societal math has changed, today, that entire approach is a bankrupt strategy.
Historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in 1961, theorized that all societies pass through distinct stages, including genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration. He argued that civilizations tend to fall, not because of environmental factors or attacks from the outside, but because they become incapable of solving new problems. According to his theory, the very people we once thought of as superior—whether in intellect, creativity, wealth or some other quality – in an effort to maintain dominance, end up forming the very barriers that prevent society from adapting, and thus, surviving. Essentially, they commit suicide.
The ultimate sign, according to Toynbee, that a civilization has lost all coherence is when it enters Stage Four, where the dominant group forms what he calls a “universal state”: the attempt to hold, by force and “against all right and reason – a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit.” Anyone looking can see how this applies to where we are today.
So, here we are, with an awful bill that this administration is trying to railroad through, with a cowed Congress and a complicit Supreme Court, a bill that’s only being held back by the handful of senators whose only weapon is the filibuster. But what if it’s broken? That’s exactly the scorched earth tactic that MAGA-aligned members of the House are advocating.
But even members of the Senate who have voted for the SAVE America Act understand the ramifications of such a gamble, especially when they lose their majority. (Notice I said “when,” not “if.” That’s because the shift has already happened. The days of any faction wresting control of the reins are done. We now need a new way of being a nation, one that finally lives up to the dreams that birthed us.)
In Bad Faith, I described how, as of 2019, every American under 18 is now part of a generation where no ethnic/racial group is a majority, and that this is exactly how that generation wants it. They, in many ways, are Martin’s ideological children, the first generation that truly believes we’re a fundamentally better nation with no one holding prevailing power, and each of us standing for all of us. Thankfully, they’re our future. And it’s never looked brighter.
Case in point, Dissenters, the Gen Z/Gen Alpha activism group taking an entirely new approach to social change. “They tell us that war is necessary to keep us safe,” their manifesto says:
They tell us that Black communities are criminal and dangerous, therefore police need military-grade weaponry to combat them; Protesters are disturbing the peace so they must be beaten and jailed; Terrorists threaten freedom and democracy, therefore the surveillance and harassment of Muslim communities is justified; Immigrants are drug dealers and thieves, therefore border security protects jobs and keeps peace. The very communities dying under militarism are the same ones we are told we should be afraid of. This leaves us living in fear of one another, and of the most marginalized among us. But the tides are turning. We choose to be the generation that dissents.
We are the most globally interconnected generation in history, and we value life everywhere. We will not be divided. We know that real safety comes from caring for each other and our environment. We are the many. We are young, we are energized, and we are visionaries. We are Muslim, immigrant, Black, indigenous, undocumented, ex-military, trans, queer and everyone else. We are a generation of hope, of healers and creatives. We are dissenters. And we’re reclaiming what belongs to us.
When I get to heaven, gonna sing and shout. Be nobody there to put me out. Keep your hand on that plow, and hold on. Hold on (hold on), hold on (hold on). Keep your hand on the plow, and hold on.
All of which gets us back to the SAVE America Act, the latest in an insanely long list of tactics meant to ensure that only certain people vote. Realistically, if the bill is passed at least ten days before the first state sends out ballots, its requirements can be in effect for the 2026 elections. And if that happens that late in the game, it will be all but impossible for many people to secure acceptable proof of citizenship in order to register.
That leaves us in a state where the vote itself is reliant on both the Democrats’ ability to hold the line on the filibuster AND the Republicans’ ability to do the same with respect to not abolishing it. If either of those fails, the Act passes. And the poorest Americans among us are locked out of the vote. We can’t pin the future of democracy on a wing and a prayer. Nor do we need to.
Take Texas and Georgia, both of which, five years ago, became minority-majority states. Right now, the interfaith contingent of ministers who are part of CAN DO (Clergy Action Network for Democracy Organizing), a group I and two others founded is engaged in a full range of “redemptive resistance” work, including what we call “pre-credentialing.”
We’re providing both administrative and economic assistance to low-income citizens in need of “disenfranchisement-proof” ID, proof of citizenship that’s acceptable no matter what laws are passed. Either a passport or passport card clears that bar. It’s a service we’re offering to any American who lacks means, with no regard to how they vote. That’s because “democracy” means “all”. Anything less is something else.
We have more than 2,000 low-income citizens already on our pre-credentialing waiting list in Georgia, and almost twice that number in Texas. But the Brennan Institute estimates that 1 in 10 Americans are vulnerable to being deprived of the vote if the SAVE America Act passes.
$200. That’s really all it costs, plus someone who can help with the administrative hoops and hurdles is all it takes to secure for people the right to vote. As such, I urge every voter registration organization out there to adopt a similar approach, shifting from voter registration drives to voter pre-credentialing drives. Because a $200 passport card per person is democracy at a discount. The whole thing reminds me of those MasterCard ads – “New designer outfit? $250. New lipstick? $35. Evening bag? $90. The look on your ex-boyfriend’s face? Priceless.”
Today, we’re right in the middle of the maelstrom, at that threshold moment Martin called “the fierce urgency of now,” that place where it feels like every bad thing that can happen is happening. But that’s not how our story ends, nor is giving up who we are.
When the snarling dogs are set free and the pressure hoses, weaponized, we don’t turn back. We keep our hand on the plow. When they pervert the law and subvert justice, we don’t get distracted or discouraged. We keep our eyes on the prize. When they call our efforts “unwise and untimely,” we don’t back down. We commit ourselves to the bridge. We do what everyone, from ex-slaves to those locked in the Birmingham Jail did. We hold on. And just like them, we don’t just win. We change everything.
I’ve got two closing songs for you. The first is an immensely moving version of the Negro spiritual, Hold On, reverently delivered by a trio of men, each with phenomenal voices. The second is the Alabama Shakes’ contemporary song that bears not just the same title but the same sentiments of resilience and perseverance. Written and sang by fellow Alabamian and Euro/African American singer and guitarist Brittany Howard, this latter version embodies so much of both how far we’ve come and the people we can someday be.
Given the unprecedented times we’re in, the members of both CAN DO (the Clergy Action Network for Democracy Organizing) and the Young Activist Network are doing everything they can to stand with the most vulnerable. Everything from providing sanctuary for immigrants to helping people secure passport cards.
But we have far more people who need help than we have funds. If you can support this work, or can connect us with others who can help, now is the time.
100% of proceeds to the SUGRR Benevolence Fund goes directly to those on the front lines. $100 feeds two people in hiding for a week, and $200 provides one person with a passport card.