Entry · catalog no. 1173
make a way out of no way
/ /ˌmeɪk ə ˈweɪ ˌaʊt əv ˈnoʊ ˌweɪ/ /mayk uh WAY owt uhv NOH way
phrase · Black Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal congregations across the Deep South and the Great Migration cities; documented in Montgomery, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia · 1950s
✓ Verified
1.
To produce a means where none exists; said of God, and said of the people God is understood to work through. The phrase is testimony rather than prediction: it is spoken looking back at rent that got paid, a child who got through school, a family that ate, and it names the gap between what was possible and what happened. Its grammar matters. It does not say a way was found or a way was opened. It says a way was made, and made out of no way — the obstacle itself converted into the passage.
“Four children, no husband, and a domestic's wages, and she made a way out of no way for every one of them.”
2.
In Black theological writing, a shorthand for a whole account of divine action and human survival: God working with what is at hand, in partnership with the oppressed, rather than intervening from outside history. Monica A. Coleman built a womanist process theology on the phrase in 2008; the underlying idea had been carried in ordinary church speech for at least half a century before that.
“She argues that making a way out of no way is not a miracle story but a description of how God actually works.”
Origin & Attribution
The saying belongs to twentieth-century Black American church speech — Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal pulpits and the pews that answered them — and its distinguishing feature is a preposition. The paremiologist Charles Clay Doyle, writing in Proverbium in 2014, established that the older English versions of the paradox all run making a way where no way was or where none appeared, and that the construction out of no way is specific to African American use, where it puns on the idiom a way out and implies that the impossibility itself is the raw material. Doyle traced the ancestor forms abundantly among nineteenth-century Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic — John Barclay in 1816, William Allen writing to Czar Alexander I in 1823, obituaries and mission reports in Friends' Review through the 1880s — and behind them to John Calvin's Latin commentary on the Psalms (1557), Englished by Arthur Golding in 1571. Doyle is careful to say the line of transmission from Quakers to Black preachers is a hypothesis, not a finding, and that polygenesis is possible. What is documented is the Black form. Martin Luther King Jr. used it on 28 April 1957 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, in a sermon called The Rewards of Worship transcribed from an audio recording, describing a preacher talking about the man who could make a way out of no way — and King himself framed it as something already in circulation, not something he was minting. He returned to it in Our God Is Able in Strength to Love (1963). Two misattributions are worth correcting: the phrase is not a Negro spiritual, and it did not originate with Coleman's 2008 book, which takes its title from a saying already old in the pews.
1957
Martin Luther King Jr. preaches The Rewards of Worship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, on 28 April, using the phrase as an already-current formula — the earliest firmly dated Black use verified
1994
Andrew Young titles his spiritual memoir A Way Out of No Way, moving the phrase from pulpit to book jacket
2016
The National Museum of African American History and Culture opens on 24 September with a permanent third-floor exhibition named Making a Way Out of No Way
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Black Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal congregations across the Deep South and the Great Migration cities; documented in Montgomery, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia · 1950s
Spoken by
Preachers, church mothers, grandmothers, and anyone giving testimony; carried into political speech by movement leaders
$MAKEAWThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring69 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
78/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1957
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Martin Luther King Jr., The Rewards of Worship, sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Ala., 28 April 1957, transcribed from audio; The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 6
sermon · audio transcript
■
Martin Luther King Jr., Our God Is Able, in Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963)
sermon · book
■
Andrew Young, A Way Out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1994)
memoir · book
■
Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008)
theology · book
■
Wolfgang Mieder, Making a Way Out of No Way: Martin Luther King's Sermonic Proverbial Rhetoric (New York: Peter Lang, 2010)
paremiology · book
■
Charles Clay Doyle, A Way Out of No Way: A Note on the Background of the African American Proverbial Saying, Proverbium 31 (2014): 193–198
journal · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceMaking a Way Out of No Way, permanent exhibition, National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened 24 September 2016
museum · exhibition
See also