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 .

"You mean this isn't why neoconservatives worship him...?"

Neos have been in the front lines fighting AA for the last 20 years. Actually, a paleoconservative once admitted as much to me. He just thought neos were doing it because AA keeps so many Jews out of the universities.

I think we need to distinguish between the founders of neoconservatism, who know what it is start out with nothing and make it, and their pampered children, whose bellies may not be in the fight.

The political and economic emancipation of Black America becomes more tarnished every year?

Thanks for the history lesson. I wasn't aware that MLK was "the Great Emancipator." (Economic emancipation, too? Wow -- MLK was even greater than what the public schools teach!)

Very funny. Yes, the public schools teach that Blacks are still economically enslaved. That's the logic that is used to support affirmative action today. King did more than "affirmative action" and quotas; his work led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the practical desegregation of countless institutions across America, including "private" institutions such as bus lines and lunch counters. King confronted Jim Crow and won.

But he didn't economically emancipate black Americans; their greatest economic progress preceded the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it didn't follow it.

Would you rather credit others for these deeds or would you prefer to discredit the deeds entirely? If the former, I'd say you're mistaken - there is no better person to canonize (LBJ? JFK?). If the latter, you're just sick.

None of those names played any role in black economic progress -- they hadn't even been elected President and VP yet, respectively. So whom do I give the credit? No particular individual deserves it (certainly not King, who was indifferent to the role of black businessmen in creating black-owned wealth), as opposed to the scores of largely anonymous blacks who between 1940 and 1960, persevered and prevailed. (If you want to cite a black hero in matters of economic emancipation, the article names someone who really deserves credit, long before King -- Booker T. Washington.)

However, that also means giving credit to the many anonymous whites (teachers, employers, etc.) without whom much of that black progress would not have occurred.

And then there is a third group -- the truly forgotten black folks, who risked everything, starting businesses, many of which succeeded (most new businesses fail, regardless of race of their founder). Unfortunately, that entrepreneurial spirit is largely dead in America in the age of AA.

And exactly what do you think the difference is between AAPs, as originally intended, and quotas?

I think there are at least two different answers to that question, based on there having been at least two different groups of supporters of AAPs. One group thought you could actually have non-quota AA. This group was naive. The other group didn't for a minute believe you could have non-quota AA, but cynically paid lip-service to that goal.

What I know best is higher ed. In higher ed in New York City, the wedge issue was remediation. AA supporters insisted you could take the most rigorous undergraduate college in America, the City College of New York, and relax admissions requirements for students who were allegedly just shy of meeting the school's Olympian standards. The AA students were admitted in 1965. But they weren't close to meeting CCNY's admissions standards; they weren't in the same galaxy. In case you think I'm exaggerating, the book Errors & Expectations by Mina Shaughnessy, who ran the CCNY remedial writing program at the time, contains hundreds of examples. (The book is out of print, but I bought it used from half.com.)

In 1969, some of those same students took over buldings at CCNY, demanding that all admissions standards be eliminated; the City University of New York trustees caved in, and the following year made all of CUNY an "open admissions" system. And the CUNY degree -- particularly CCNY's -- was soon worthless.

During the 1990s, I taught remediation at CUNY for several years. While the media spoke of CUNY's remedial classes as functioning on a high school level, some of my college-level students cut to the chase: the remedial classes functioned on a third-grade level. (Note that the students I cited did not attend one of CUNY's "big three" of Baruch, Queens, and Brooklyn colleges, where standards were presumably higher.) And remedial classes were dragging down the standards in "college-level" classes, as remedial students were permitted simultaneously to take remedial and college-level classes.

Under AA, all over America elite universities began routinely accepting students who could not possibly meet their academic standards. And so began the regime of "mismatching," and a vicious circle of black failure that has since spread like ripples from a stone, to graduate schools and to predominantly black public schools.

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