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“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” It goes on graduation cards, hospital noticeboards and the back of church bulletins, with Martin Luther King Jr.’s name underneath it. Here is the honest answer: nobody has found that sentence in anything King wrote, preached or recorded. People have gone looking. What exists instead is a memory — one woman who heard him say something like it in a college chapel, and who first put it in print about a quarter of a century later.
And the wording on the card is not even the wording she reported.
That does not make the line a fake, and it does not make her wrong. It makes it something other than a quotation, and the difference turns out to be worth knowing.
Where “you don’t have to see the whole staircase” actually comes from
The trail is short, and there is one witness standing at the end of it.
Marian Wright Edelman was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta, graduating in 1960 as valedictorian. She took part in the student sit-in movement while she was there, and she went on to found the Children’s Defense Fund. King came and spoke at her college while she was a student.
The first time the staircase idea appears in print is 30 March 1986 — eighteen years after King’s death — in an interview with Edelman in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, by staff writer Deena Mirow. She recalls King introducing her to the idea of taking one step even if you cannot see the whole stairway when you start.
Look closely at that and you will notice something. There are no quotation marks in it. She was describing an idea she got from him, not reporting his words.
The words themselves arrive five years later. In the May–June 1991 issue of Mother Jones, Edelman wrote about King’s talks at Spelman and put it in his mouth directly:
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
Then on 30 April 1999 she told the Houston Chronicle‘s Claudia Feldman a third version: “Just because you can’t see the whole stairway, that doesn’t mean you don’t take the first step.”
Three accounts. The same idea every time, and three different sentences.
That is exactly what an honest memory looks like thirty years on. It is also not a transcript. Edelman knew King, heard him, and spent the rest of her life on the work he was talking about — which is why researchers take her seriously rather than waving the line away. But a recollection and a record are two different kinds of thing, and only one of them can be checked.
Then there is the version almost everyone shares today: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” That is a fourth wording, and it is not Edelman’s either. The quote-tracing project Quote Investigator, which assembled this whole chain of citations, finds that phrasing in a 2006 Reader’s Digest collection, Treasury of Wit & Wisdom, compiled by Jeff Bredenberg, with King’s name under it.
So the sentence on the graduation card has been smoothed twice. Once by a witness remembering a chapel from decades earlier, and once more by whoever tidied it up for a gift book.
The sentence turns up in 1865, sixty-four years before King was born
This is the part that surprised us most, and you can read it yourself — the book has been scanned and is free online.
In 1865 an English Quaker called Henry Stanley Newman published a short book titled Foreign Missions Reviewed. He was in his late twenties, a grocer by trade, and he was making an argument to his fellow Quakers: start a missionary society now, even though not a single missionary had yet come forward to go anywhere. Other societies, he pointed out, had been formed before they had any volunteers.
Then he wrote this:
“Take the first step in faith, and God will find us a footing for the second.”
That is the staircase, without the word staircase. “A footing for the second” is a stair.
And there is a small, good ending to it. Three years later, in 1868, the Friends Foreign Mission Association was founded. Newman became its secretary and held the job until he died in 1912. He wrote about missions in India, Africa, Palestine and North America, and edited the Quaker paper The Friend for around twenty years. He took his own first step and he got his footing.
There is no evidence King ever read Newman, and we are not suggesting he did. The point is smaller and more interesting than influence. This is an old thought that people keep finding. A Quaker found it in 1865. A college chapel in Atlanta heard a version of it around 1960. A gift book tidied it in 2006. Somebody will find it again next year and think it is new.
What King actually said about walking without seeing the end
Here is why this is worth correcting rather than just being true: King’s own documented words on this exact subject are better than the card.
Two of them, both from the record.
A kitchen table, 27 January 1956
King was 27 years old. He had been leading the Montgomery bus boycott for about seven weeks, and the day before he had been arrested and taken to jail. Late that evening the telephone rang with a threat. He got up, made himself coffee, and sat down at his kitchen table.
His own account of that night, in his book Stride Toward Freedom, says he was “ready to give up.” He describes the cup in front of him: “With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me.” He remembered the thought that kept circling — “the people are looking to me for leadership.”
Then he prayed out loud. And he wrote afterwards that he experienced “the presence of the Divine,” and that something answered him: “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.”
That is a man taking a first step without seeing the staircase. But notice what is in his version that the card leaves out. He was frightened. He wanted out. And he did not get shown the staircase. He got told he would have company on the stair he was already standing on.
A church in Memphis, 3 April 1968
Twelve years later King stood up at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. It was the last speech he ever gave. He was killed the following day.
Near the end of it he said:
“I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
Set that beside the staircase line for a moment. The card says you do not need to see the whole staircase. King said something considerably harder: he might not reach the top of it at all, and he was going anyway.
That is not a smaller thought than the quote. It is the same thought with the cost left in.
Why the difference is not pedantry
The staircase line is kind, and it does real work in the world. It gets said to someone standing at the front edge of something frightening — a first day, a diagnosis, a move to a country where they know nobody, a decision that cannot be undone. Most of us first heard it from somebody who meant us well.
But the two versions make two different promises, and the difference matters most to the person who needs it most.
The card version promises a view: take the step, and the next stair will appear. That is a promise about the staircase.
King’s documented version promises a companion: you may not see it, you may not finish it, and you will not be on it by yourself. That is a promise about who is with you.
The first one can quietly fail somebody. If you take the step in good faith and the next stair does not appear — and sometimes it genuinely does not — the saying has nothing left to say to you. It has already spent everything it had. The second one still holds in the dark, because it never depended on the stair being there.
This is the same shape we found in “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” — a line nobody can locate in anything Gandhi wrote, which survives because it is a genuinely good summary of what he believed. The staircase line belongs to that family. It is a true summary of King, reported by someone who loved him. It is not his sentence.
The idea is far older than any of them
Newman’s 1865 line was not original either, and as a Quaker writer he would have told you so himself.
The oldest version of the staircase is a man leaving home without a map. Hebrews 11:8, in the King James:
“By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.”
Not knowing whither he went. That is the whole saying in five words, written down thousands of years before anybody thought to put it on a staircase.
And the line that opens that chapter does not describe faith as a step at all. Hebrews 11:1:
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Substance. Not a brave feeling about the dark — something solid in it. That chapter rewards reading whole; we looked at another line from it here, and it is not the line most people expect.
So, did he say it?
Something like it, almost certainly — on the word of a witness who was in the room and who spent her life proving she had understood him correctly.
In those exact words, no. There is no record of them anywhere in his writing, his sermons or his recordings, and the version most of us share is not even the version she reported.
That is a strange, human answer, and it is the true one. It is also not a reason to stop saying the line. It is a reason to know what you are holding when you say it: not a quotation, but a memory of a man who sat at a kitchen table near midnight with untouched coffee, ready to give up, and who told a church in Memphis twelve years later that he might not get there with them.
If you say the staircase line to someone this week, you could tell them that part too. It is the half that holds when the next stair does not appear.
A question for you
Which quote have you always assumed came straight from the person whose name is on it? Most of us are carrying at least one — a line of Lewis’s, a line of Einstein’s, something a grandparent swore was in the Bible. Tell us the one that surprised you most, and who you first heard it from. We read every comment, and these answers are how we choose what to dig into next.
Questions and Answers
Did Martin Luther King Jr. say “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase”?
Not in those words, as far as anyone can show. “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase” has not been found in any of Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings, sermons or recorded speeches. That exact phrasing appears in a 2006 Reader’s Digest collection, Treasury of Wit & Wisdom, with King’s name attached. The idea does trace back to him through one credible witness — Marian Wright Edelman, who heard him speak at Spelman College around 1960 — but her own published versions of the sentence differ from each other and from the popular wording. You will see it going round as “take the first step in faith, you don’t have to see the whole staircase,” as “faith is taking the first step when you can’t see the whole staircase,” with “stairway” in place of staircase, and shortened to “just take the first step.” None of those phrasings can be traced to King himself. It is best described as a recollection of King rather than a quotation from him.
Who really said “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step”?
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step” was published by Marian Wright Edelman in the May–June 1991 issue of Mother Jones, where she attributed it to Martin Luther King Jr. from his talks at Spelman College. That is the earliest known appearance of the staircase wording. Edelman had described the same idea earlier, in a Cleveland Plain Dealer interview on 30 March 1986, but without quoting King directly. No recording or manuscript of King saying it has been found, so the attribution rests entirely on Edelman’s memory.
Is “faith is taking the first step” in the Bible?
No, “faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase” is not a Bible verse and appears in no translation. The closest verse in meaning is Hebrews 11:8, which in the King James Version reads: “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.” Hebrews 11:1 is also close: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Note that neither verse describes faith as a step — one describes a journey taken without knowing the destination, and the other calls faith something solid rather than something felt.
What is the oldest known version of the “first step in faith” saying?
The oldest known printing of the “first step in faith” idea is from 1865, sixty-four years before Martin Luther King Jr. was born. In a short book called Foreign Missions Reviewed, the English Quaker writer Henry Stanley Newman wrote: “Take the first step in faith, and God will find us a footing for the second.” He was arguing that Quakers should start a missionary society before any missionaries had volunteered. Three years later the Friends Foreign Mission Association was founded, and Newman served as its secretary until his death in 1912. The book has been digitised and the sentence can be read in the original scan.
What did Martin Luther King actually say about going on without knowing the outcome?
Martin Luther King Jr.’s documented words on this are stronger than the staircase saying. On 3 April 1968 at Mason Temple in Memphis, in the last speech of his life, he said: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” Twelve years before that, in his book Stride Toward Freedom, he described sitting at his kitchen table late on 27 January 1956 after a threatening phone call, “ready to give up,” with “my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me.” He prayed, and wrote that he experienced “the presence of the Divine.” Both accounts are first-hand and verifiable, which the staircase line is not.
If you want to share this
Short version: I have had the MLK staircase quote on my wall for years. Nobody can find it in anything he wrote or said. The whole trail leads back to one woman’s memory of hearing him in a college chapel — and even her three published versions of it don’t match each other.
The part that got me: “Take the first step in faith, and God will find us a footing for the second.” An English Quaker grocer wrote that in 1865, sixty-four years before King was born. Then he spent forty-four years running the missionary society he had argued for. He took the step.
One more: The card says you don’t need to see the whole staircase. King, in the last speech of his life, said “I may not get there with you” — he might never reach the top at all, and he was going anyway. Same idea, cost left in. I know which one I’d want said to me on a bad day.
