NewsFlash! Attention Neo-Conservatives: Martin Luther King Supported Affirmative Action

As neoconservatives have constantly reminded us in the affirmative action debate, Martin Luther King Jr. argued for people to be judged based on the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. Hence, they say, 'Martin would have opposed affirmative action; you do the same.'

Enter journalist Leonard Greene. Writing on January 20, when Martin Luther King Day was celebrated this year, in "Listen to His Whole Message," Greene argued that King actually supported affirmative action. Now, I knew that King supported affirmative action by the time of his death – a fact that neoconservatives conveniently gloss over – but had thought that he'd changed his mind sometime between his August 28, 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial and his April 4, 1968 assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Greene cites King's book, Why We Can't Wait, also published in 1963, in which King already supported affirmative action.

"America 'must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past,' King wrote in the book Why We Can't Wait.

[King wrote] "It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years."

Greene claims that conservatives who quote the most famous passage from King's 1963 speech, "I Have a Dream" – "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" – do so by taking it out of context, and insinuates that they have never read the speech in its entirety. Greene calls the passage "perhaps the most misappropriated excerpt of a generation."

Now, that's a curious charge to make against white conservatives, who may be the only group in America, outside of a handful of historians, who have read all of King's speech.

My experience during six-and-a-half years of teaching college during the 1990s, during which I frequently taught King's speech, was that my black students had never read it. King's rich language might as well have been Greek to them.

Ignorance of King's speech owes much to the greed of his heirs, who sue everyone who reprints or replays the speech, even TV networks such as CBS who filmed it and are thus exercising their own property rights, to shake them down for rights payments. Such extortion is particularly odd, given that in copyrighting the speech, King violated the copyright of the Rev. Archibald Carey. The climactic "Let freedom ring ... " passages were all stolen from a speech that Carey, then a famous black preacher, delivered before the 1952 Republican Convention.

(The phrase "I have a dream," now inextricably linked to King, was then a common phrase, and was most famously associated with the lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who used it in the form "I had a dream," in the Tony Award-winning, 1959 Broadway musical, Gypsy, and the eponymous, 1962 movie, both of which were based on the autobiography of one of America's biggest celebrities, retired stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.)

And yet, we shouldn't be too hard on King's heirs, since as Ted Pappas shows in his exhaustively documented work, Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Other Prominent Americans, they were simply following King's own example. Not only were most of King's major works and speeches plagiaries committed by a man who compulsively coveted other men's words – and women – but during his life, King vigorously defended their copyright, especially that of "I Have a Dream." However, the mainstream media are too timid to bring up such unpopular facts in a court proceeding against the Kings. (About the only works published in King's name that weren't plagiaries were those that were ghostwritten for him by Andrew Young, Stanley Levison, and other associates.)

Every year, on MLK day, TV stations broadcast excerpts of King delivering the speech, the speech has frequently been aired on the PBS documentary, Eyes on the Prize, and American public school children have for years been taught that Martin King – as he is known to those who study his life – was the greatest American who ever lived. Indeed, King is the only American who still has a federal holiday in his name: Washington and Lincoln's birthdays have been subsumed into "Presidents' Day," their memories officially no more significant than those of James Buchanan, Warren Harding, or Gerald Ford.

For most black Americans, Martin Luther King is the embodiment of the notion of black rights, in other words, the idea that one SHOULD be judged by the color of his skin, not the content of his character. White neoconservatives have always sought to use King as a bridge to racial reconciliation, even as they suggest that blacks really don't know what he was talking about. Conversely, Leonard Greene explicitly says that neoconservatives have no idea what King was talking about, while suggesting that blacks understand him just fine.

I think blacks understand King via the following exercise in equivocation: Saying 'A person should be judged by the content of his character,' while thinking, 'but his character derives largely from the color of his skin.' Thus, the phrase "the content of their character" is merely an exercise in deception.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Greene's article is where it appeared – the New York Post. The Post belongs to the owner of neoconservatism, billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who owns News Corporation, which includes the Post, the weekly standard, the Fox Network, Fox News, and many other expensive media properties (some of which have hired me as a freelancer over the years). Surprising, because it is the neoconservatives who, more than any other group, white or black, have embraced the Martin-cult. I would have expected to find such an essay in the New York Times, before I would in the Post. The surprise evaporates, when one sees that Leonard Greene is a Post staffer.

It is fashionable among neoconservatives to praise the civil rights movement (i.e., of the 1950s and early 1960s), and to distinguish between it and today's race hustlers. And many civil rights activists did indeed show great physical courage, none more than Martin King. And some of the things those activists fought for were honorable, in particular, the right to vote, which for approximately 75 years – prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act – was violently crushed in the South. And yet, as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom point out in America in Black and White : One Nation, Indivisible, when it came to the issues that for almost forty years have been known under the rubric of "affirmative action," most civil rights leaders came down squarely in support of racial quotas, right from the get-go.

The difference between Martin and the other civil rights leaders, was that they never feigned support of colorblindness; he did. Indeed, if we take seriously King's proffered vision, it would lead to the disappearance of the black race through intermarriage.

"I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers."

King knew darned well, that if you let little black and white boys and girls "join hands" today, you'll have little mulatto babies tomorrow. King didn't want that; he'd have had a heart attack, if any of his children had ever dated whites. (That is, had he lived long enough to see any of children date anybody.)

Leonard Greene calls on people to take "I Have a Dream" seriously in its entirety, but I don't think he really wants us to scrutinize the speech. He just wants us to accept his interpretation of the speech's meaning.

Now, the above passage is nonsense on stilts. As Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Thomas Sowell, and other leading social scientists have pointed out, the period of 1940-1960 saw the greatest explosion in black prosperity in American history. By contrast, since the advent of affirmative action in the mid-1960s, black wealth has stagnated.

It is not the fault of neoconservatives for seeing King as having supported colorblindness in "his" famous speech. Like most politicians, King was duplicitous. He used language to conjure up an image of different colors – which is what the colorblind ideal is, as opposed to the monochromatic images that were at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement – because he wanted white folks to believe that he represented a color-blind ideal. But he didn't.

The myth of Martin as quota-fighter is dear to white neoconservatives, because they desperately seek to invoke historical common ground between blacks and whites. Unfortunately, the common ground isn't there.

If you want to find a great black public figure who would have opposed affirmative action, consider Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), the former slave who was as great an American as any who ever lived. But Booker T., a racial accommodationist, is today unfashionable; many blacks are offended by references to him. Martin is safer. But one can embrace Martin in the fight against affirmative action, only at the expense of the truth.

Not that all blacks support affirmative action; conservatives like to cite opinion polls in which even the majority of blacks oppose it. I don't know where those black respondents live, but they sure aren't from New York ... or Washington, D.C. (nicknamed "Chocolate City" by locals) ... or Chicago... or Baltimore ... or Atlanta ... or Miami or just about any other major city I can think of.

Some prominent blacks do cry out, like lonely voices in the wilderness, against the apartheid of affirmative action. America's greatest living social scientist, Thomas Sowell, and one of her greatest columnists, Walter Williams, both support the merit principle, but they enjoy little popular support among contemporary blacks. Ward Connerly, one of the most heroic Americans alive, opposes affirmative action, but Connerly has been demonized by black leaders, academics, and media celebrities, and George W. Bush treats him like a pariah, to avoid becoming associated with him.

The brilliant writer and radio talk show host, Larry Elder, opposes affirmative action, but as Jay Leno observed when he once had Elder on The Tonight Show for about a minute-and-a-half to flog his bestselling book, The Ten Things You Can't Say in America, "Nobody'll have this guy on."

The bridge between whites and blacks on affirmative action – and just about everything else – is washed out. So, why not forget about using Martin for political expedience, which won't work anyway, forget about trying to build bridges to people who despise you and don't want to be bound to you, and just stick to morality and the truth?

Affirmative action is a moral outrage. There is no justification for admitting an unqualified student to a college or graduate school, or hiring an unqualified person, or letting a contract to an unqualified person, based on the color of his skin, any more than there is a justification for rejecting a qualified person based on the color of his skin. And when you hire or contract with incompetents, people die.

People who practice affirmative action are frauds and racists. Frauds, because they have advertised and purported to be acting based on the merits, but have actually engaged in deception. And they are racists, because affirmative action is merely a euphemism for racial discrimination.

Affirmative action is racist, and it has terrible consequences. It's that simple, and if Martin Luther King didn't understand that, so much the worse for him. Affirmative action isn't a dream, it's a nightmare.

To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .

He supported AA because at the time it was needed.

This may require 20/20 hindsight on King's part, but I don't think it's possible to support a government program as a temporary measure. Once instituted, it is so difficult to end a program, that we have to look at every one we support as permanent.

Note too that virtually all civil rights leaders supported quotas, without any notion of them being temporary, and Justice Thurgood Marshall privately told people 30 years ago, that AA would be necessary "for 100 years," which is just another way of saying, "forever."

You mean this criminal,whore monger,and communist liar whose goal was to destroy America and our Constitution supported affirmative action? I'm shocked,SHOCKED,I TELL YA!

I'm sorry, sneaky, but I can't understand you when you talk with marbles in your mouth. Just spit out what you want to say, and stop beating around the bush!

MLK wasn't racist. He supported AA because at the time it was needed. That makes sense to most well educated Black people like myself and Colin Powell.

I don't have any argument with this. The people on this board who attack MLK so much should learn a little more about George Washington.* Heros are rarely perfect and shooting them down is not a conservative enterprise.

Re King and AA, there was just a bit on this in an autobiography which I read many years ago, and I am almost certain it was that of Ralph Abernathy. According to Abernathy, at the end of his life King had to decide whether to concentrate on getting what he had won actually enforced, or move on to new issues. According to Abernathy, he chose the latter in part due to fear of being seen as an irrelevant has-been within a new more militant black America. This earned Abernathy predictable denunciations as a race traitor, even though the book was mostly sympathetic to King.

* If anyone really must know about this allusion, check out the Washington book by Marvin Kitman. And anyone who wants to denounce the book (even though it is mostly in Washington's words) is free to do so and will get no retort from me.

This may require 20/20 hindsight on King's part,...

Hindsight? King lived in a time (as did my parents who grew up in Miss.) when there was NO justice for a black person. To them, injustice was just too real. King's generation took the best chances they could get to seek any sort of balance.

Marshall was radical. But remember, that generation SAW things that would absolutely unacceptable today (ie. James Byrd's murder) and often nothing was done at the time.

King's generation also had much thicker skin than its descendants do. However, you are ignoring the fact that in King's time, black economic progress grew in leaps and bounds never seen before or since. It was the progress, not the injustices, that inflamed King & Co. Were injustice a motive for action, blacks would have acted most aggressively during slavery, somewhat less during Jim Crow, and not at all (or barely) by the 1960s.

So, maybe, just maybe, you are looking at King's generation through pc blinders.

Marshall was radical. But remember, that generation SAW things that would absolutely unacceptable today (ie. James Byrd's murder) and often nothing was done at the time.

Look how many times Byron De La Beckwith had to be tried in order to convict him of a crime everybody knew he committed. De La Beckwith (I still can't figure out what the deal is with that name) was the O.J. of the sixties!

Affirmative Action, the leftist term for racial discrimination, was wrong from the outset. It is never at any time justifyable to punish an entire group of people for the actions of some members of that group. Such a notion goes against any traditional concept of justice and is in fact much closer to a Marxist concept that Thomas Sowell refers to as "cosmic justice." True justice is bringing remedy for wrongs done to individuals by other individuals, and to a limited degree, voluntarily organized groups of individuals (like a corporation). AA's entire purpose is to punish whites as a race, though its supporters rarely have the courage to admit that purpose openly. It has put us on the poisonous path to "group rights," a concept that has now metastitized thoughout the nation's judiciary like a cancer.

He supported affirmative action, pure and simple.

But what did "affirmative action" mean? My understanding is that at the time it merely meant ensuring that whites with inferior credentials were not given preference over blacks with superior credentials, not that blacks with inferior credentials should be given preference over whites with superior credentials.

I would expect that King would support the former and oppose the latter.

I've read that when "Affirmative Action" was first introduced, its purpose was purely to ensure that blacks weren't discriminated against. Its purpose was later corrupted to discriminate "in favor" of blacks [I use the quotes because such discrimination in the long term benefits neither blacks nor whites].

I think you're mixing anti-discrimination laws, like some of the civil-rights acts enacted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the government policy labeled affirmative action. (Named by a bureaucrat who worked in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, as I recall.) The 1978 Bakke ruling pertained to this policy instituted by the government bureaucracy (part of the Executive branch) that is enforced upon state universities, private corporations, etc. Bakke's suit (and the current suit of the Michigan students) was brought under the Civil Rights statute. This discriminatory interpretation/application of the law by the government is the issue. The law itself was ostensibly color-blind (hence Hubert Humphrey's famous remark in the debate that he would eat the legislation page by page if there was anything in the law that allowed quotas), though some conservative critics like Barry Goldwater didn't seem to think so at the time.

So, maybe, just maybe, you are looking at King's generation through pc blinders.

Maybe, just maybe, you are blind to the realities of that time.

That's why I know about all the economic progress blacks made prior to pc, and their lack of progress since.

When AA was introduced, its cover story was that it functioned as a tie-breaker method, "all other things being equal," and also as a form of "outreach" for qualified blacks. However, it quickly became clear to people dealing with federal officials from agencies like the EEOC, that their real agenda was "Just hire the black [or as folks said in those days, Negro] candidate." The EEOC bean-counters set up dual standards for blacks and whites, respectively. Political scientist John Bunzel, who ca. 1970 was the president of a Calif. State U. system campus (San Francisco State?), wrote about this in The American Scholar around 1990.

Since "outreach" was already a fraud thirty-odd years ago, anyone who supports it now, is just a phony pulling a Bill Clinton on race -- or has no idea what he's talking about.

He supported affirmative action, pure and simple.

And George Washington kept slaves, so what. In both cases the good these men did far outweigh their wrongs.

Most of George Washington's good deeds have stood up to the test of time; but with every year that passes, MLK's legacy becomes more tarnished. Or do you know about a bunch of MLK's achievements that I'm not aware of? Or are you just echoing the official story on King?

BTW, did you bother reading the article at the top of this thread? I mean the whole article, not the first few sentences.

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