You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression. . . . There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.

These lines come from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In the speech’s earlier, more explicitly political section, King explains why African Americans could not accept gradualism or calls to “wait” for civil rights. Using vivid seasonal and bodily imagery, he frames Black Americans’ impatience as a rational response to long, systematic oppression—segregation, disenfranchisement, economic exclusion, and racial violence—rather than as agitation for its own sake.

King argues that oppression has a breaking point: sustained injustice produces moral and psychological exhaustion that makes delay intolerable. The metaphor of “iron feet” emphasizes the crushing, impersonal force of racist systems, while the contrast between “life’s July” and “an alpine November” dramatizes exclusion from ordinary human flourishing—warmth, visibility, and ease—into cold isolation and hardship. Repeating “There comes a time” turns the passage into a rhythmic insistence that the demand for civil rights is not premature but overdue. The imagery helps translate political urgency into felt experience, strengthening the case for immediate action.