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."
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."
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.
Having been first entering the job market and thence involved in a small construction business that was hiring a new crew for each job it built in the late sixties, as a kid I learned the ins and outs of the political climate that fostered the Affirmative Action programs for the EEO office at the time.
It was seen by those that introduced it from the executive branch to be a way to temporarily change the hiring climate. Many businesses had an "internal", institutionalized, wall against hiring black for any postition, women for job "x", or jews for job "y". That was known and thought to be a very tiresome thing that, dispite the civil rights act, would take a very long time to wither away.
It wasn't so much opposed by conservatives at the time, but more by the southern voting block that was stinging from the battles it had recently lost in the Civil Rights legislation of the late fifties and the Civil Rights Act of '64. But the temporary vision of the EO when it was introduced in '65 and then expanded by Johnson in '67 and then further instituionalized by Nixon, was still a vision of a temporary leveling of the playing field due to conditions that had sloped it in the other direction.
Political decisions are often compromise, artificial constructs and products of temporary coalitions and prudent measures to meet a problem of the day. Unmet, such problems fester, as indeed the institutionalized job segregation did.
Our nation, like any, regards as legitiment, those acts of government most closely adhering in their creation to the processes laid down in its constitution and its history. This is why the non-judicial action, of an activist court, making law rather than interperting it, in Roe v. Wade has had little acceptance. Likewise, Executive fiat in making law is often felt non-legitiment. But this Executive Order 11246 which dealt with government contractors and those wishing to sell to the government that all citizens pay for in their taxes, was felt to be the temporary measure to (1) forstall quotas elsewhere, which many knew was the truely divisive issue, and (2) to be a true measure of the Executive Branch laying in place a program to implement the civil rights acts measures in the one arena that the Feds could rightly control, their own purchasing.
But people remember what was promised. It was promised that this was a temporary measure, and it was promised that it wouldn't become a quota. When programs go through elaborate constructs to thwart the Baake case such as the case that brought this current fever about, people know that a wrong turn has been taken.
Think of it. A point system for evaluating graduate program students that awards 150 points on race alone, while awarding 100 points for a PERFECT SAT SCORE.
If such programs haven't now become unequal application of law and public funds, what else can they be termed?
No, this temporary measure, understood in its time, is due for retirement. Lets see where we are now. Many friends of mine who are minority owners of contracting business, despise the government niches such programs carve out. They wish to be plain business owners preforming a simple trade, no more, no less.
As a white former Army EEO officer, I can tell all here that Affirmative Action plans as originally devised were not code words for quotas. The socialists in the Democratic party have equated AA with quotas. Nothing could be further from the original intent of AAPs. I support AA, but not quotas; and those who do not understand the difference have no business criticizing MLK's support of AA.