Hijacking A Civil Rights Hero

Advocates of racial preferences usually go ballistic when those of us who oppose them quote Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, especially:

I have a dream that my four little 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.

They reply with one version or another of “If King were alive today….” I replied to this argument at some length here:

In a recent post discussing some of the fallout from Martin Luther King’s birthday, I asked “What Do We Honor When We Honor Martin Luther King? (And Who Are ‘We’?)” There had been many protests of President Bush laying a wreath on King’s grave, nearly all of them criticizing him for betraying King by his opposition to racial preferences. Indeed, nothing seems to send preferentialists around the bend and over the top faster than critics of preferences quoting King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, as we always do.

And they always respond with one version or another of “if King were alive today” he would be a strong advocate of racial preferences. I have some reservations about this assertion, but on balance I suspect it is true. After all, all King’ followers, the NAACP (which had advocated a strong version of colorblindness in court for decade after decade), and virtually the entire Democratic party did an about face on colorblindness starting in the late 1960s, and there is no compelling reason to suppose that King himself would have stood against this trend.

Taking a page from the original meaning book, however, we can see that the proper response to the posthumous King’s probable position is, So what? King’s specific intent does not determine the meaning of the principle he evoked, either for his contemporaries or for subsequent generations. [P.S. It is also worth noting, however, as Randy did in his talk, that when we play the “if X were alive today…” game, we are not talking about actual intent but predicted intent, which is far different.] Of course in this case the text in question is not so dense and opaque, like “due process” or even “equal protection.” What part of wanting people to be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin is so difficult to understand?

Now, King’s speech is not a part of the Constitution (at least not of its text), but it has achieved a well-deserved iconic stature. It gave voice to an understanding of equality that traces it roots back at least to some of the abolitionists, that achieved partial but limited success in the Reconstruction Amendments, and that, finally, was embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the year following King’s delivery on the Mall.

Thus I beg to differ with a commenter on my King’’s birthday post linked above. Begrudgingly, “[f]or arguments sake,” she was willing “to admit the possibility that one can disagree with another’s ideals while still honoring the person.” I believe those of us who continue to resent benefits or burdens being based on skin color are honoring the meaning of Martin Luther King’s ideals much more fully than preferentialists who argue that if he were alive today he would agree with them.

Writing, as I am, about fifteen minutes from Monticello, it seems all too obvious to me that there are some ideals that are not discredited simply because their authors fail to live up to them.

Thus in quoting King we honor the principle he stood for, whether or not he would have continued to stand by that principle in the future that he was denied.

But if you want to see a real case of reversing the meaning of one of the heroic, iconic events in civil rights history, you need look no further than how Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and other opponents of colorblind equality in Michigan have stood the legacy of Rosa Parks on its head. (See, for example, the governor’s web site, here, and the event it links.)

Mrs. Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger. (The Montgomery buses had a policy that required blacks to fill up the buses from the back to the front; whites from the front to the back; and blacks to give up their seats to whites when there were no more seats.) The principle that she, and the bus boycot that followed her arrest, demanded was, first come, first served, without regard to race.

In stark contrast, racial preferences in admissions and hiring and assigning school students to elementary and high schools based on their race stands on its head the principle that Mrs. Parks stood for when she refused to stand. Abandoning the “without regard” principle is wrong, whether the justification is compensation for past wrongs or “diversity.”

Moving from segregation farther back into our past, one of the most shameful compromises that went into framing the Constitution was the decision to count slaves (never mentioned, but called “other persons” in Article I, Section 2) as three-fifths of a person for apportionment purposes. That was shameful, but by abandoning racial equality for racial preferences liberals and the civil rights movement have abandoned a fundamental principle just as clearly as they would have if they had abandoned the principle of “One person, one vote” and demanded that each black person’s vote be counted as the equivalent of 1.3 white votes.

Say What? (16)

  1. dchamil October 24, 2006 at 1:01 pm | | Reply

    I wonder who was the white person to whom Rosa Parks did not yield her seat, and was the person a man or a woman?

    As for the 3/5 apportionment rule, let’s recall that if the slaves had been counted as full persons, the (white) southern representatives in Congress would be more numerous and so have greater influence on national policy.

    In the Bible, we often find the word “servant.” I wonder if the word is more properly translated as “slave.” This would be an example of present-day editing of the Bible to make it more acceptable to us moderns.

  2. mf24 October 24, 2006 at 1:02 pm | | Reply

    I get so tired of hearing the 3/5 business misused. It was the slaveholders who wanted to count the “other persons” fully. Oh, they wouldn’t have had any rights, but the slave states’ power in congress would have been increased by the higher population number.

    This is the way I learned it back in junior high, anyway.

  3. John Rosenberg October 24, 2006 at 2:09 pm | | Reply

    You are both right; it was the slaveholders who wanted the slaves counted as (whole) people for apportionment purposes and the Northern, non-slave states that didn’t want them counted at all since they couldn’t vote, etc. (Of course, white women also couldn’t vote and were counted as whole people.)

    But there is nothing about this fact is “misued” by noting that the compromise was to count them as three-fifths of a person, or by noting that racial preferences is to racial equality as “One Person, 1.3 votes” is to “One person, One Vote.”

  4. Agog October 24, 2006 at 2:28 pm | | Reply

    Excellent post about projecting present-day attitudes onto historic quotes. MLK’s words have a plain and ordinary meaning . But since the meaning of those words is plain, any further interpretation of them is unneeded, whether offered by pro-preference advocates today or even by MLK himself. To the extent such interpretation is offered to alter what the plain words mean then that interpretation is about politics, not about language and the meaning of words.

    Consider this.

    When Thomas Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…” in 1776 he expressed a truth that was then just an aspiration. In 1776 if someone had asked Jefferson whether he meant those words to include women or Negros or Muslims he most certainly would have answered “absolutely not”. The “men” Jefferson referred to were only property owning white Christian males.

    So, should Jefferson’s subjective error diminish the universal and timeless truth of “all men are created equal”? Those who wish to spin MLK’s words would apparently answer “yes”.

  5. Agog October 24, 2006 at 2:41 pm | | Reply

    You note in your post that Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm is shamelessly attempting to hijack the legacy of Rosa Parks and you provided a link to video of Granholm’s eulogy at Parks’ funeral.

    The incomparable Peggy Noonan described Granholm’s participation in Parks’ funeral this way:

    “The only jarring note was Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, who spoke with strange intensity and was dressed in an odd black getup with dramatic neck scarf. She was like a Wicca priestess in search of a coven…”

    Heh. “Wicca priestess in search of a coven …” Now THAT’s good writing.

  6. actus October 24, 2006 at 8:23 pm | | Reply

    Why not just read what King wrote on “compensatory treatment”:

    “Whenever this issue is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.”

  7. actus October 24, 2006 at 10:04 pm | | Reply

    “It was the slaveholders who wanted to count the “other persons” fully. Oh, they wouldn’t have had any rights, but the slave states’ power in congress would have been increased by the higher population number.”

    3/5s is about how neither side wanted them to be a whole person. About the white men arguing about what the black men means to them. Without listening to the humanity of the black men.

  8. Cobra October 24, 2006 at 11:27 pm | | Reply

    Everything’s fine, except for the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King was FOR Affirmative Action type programs:

    >>>”The exploitation of King’s name, the distortion of his teachings for political gain, is an ugly development. The term “affirmative action” did not come into currency until after King’s death–but it was King himself, as chair of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who initiated the first successful national affirmative action campaign: “Operation Breadbasket.”

    In Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities, King staffers gathered data on the hiring patterns of corporations doing business in black communities, and called on companies to rectify disparities. “At present, SCLC has Operation Breadbasket functioning in some 12 cities, and the results have been remarkable,” King wrote (quoted in Testament of Hope, James Washington, ed.), boasting of “800 new and upgraded jobs [and] several covenants with major industries.”

    King was well aware of the arguments used against affirmative action policies. As far back as 1964, he was writing in Why We Can’t Wait: “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.”

    King supported affirmative action-type programs because he never confused the dream with American reality. As he put it, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro” to compete on a just and equal basis (quoted in Let the Trumpet Sound, by Stephen Oates).”

    http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1292

    Now, of course there are people on the right who want to paraphrase, cherry pick and stove pipe twenty second soundbites of MLK for anti-inclusivity, anti-minority propaganda. Bait-n-switch hustles like this are not surprising.

    –Cobra

  9. John Rosenberg October 25, 2006 at 12:56 am | | Reply

    Maybe you should reread my post. Whether or not King himself later repudiated or compromised or ignored his earlier stated dream that people not be judged by the color of their skin is irrelevant, as I said, to the power and appeal of the principle he evoked in his speech. Nor is it irrelevant that King rallied the country to accept that principle, and failed when he abandoned it.

    But then, Jefferson was a slaveholder, so I guess we should all just forget the principle that all men are created equal and do what he did, not what he said….

  10. Cobra October 25, 2006 at 8:30 am | | Reply

    John writes:

    >>>”Whether or not King himself later repudiated or compromised or ignored his earlier stated dream that people not be judged by the color of their skin is irrelevant, as I said, to the power and appeal of the principle he evoked in his speech. Nor is it irrelevant that King rallied the country to accept that principle, and failed when he abandoned it.”

    So by your own words, we should judge people based upon limited soundbites and out of context quotes?

    How would YOU YOURSELF stand up to this scrutiny, Mr. Rosenberg, given the fact that you must have, by now, THOUSANDS of statements online ready to be cherry-picked and stove-piped by spirited, motivated opponents?

    –Cobra

  11. Hull October 25, 2006 at 9:25 am | | Reply

    Actus nailed it.

    President Johnson made a similar statement in a 1965 speech at Howard University,

    “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others’, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

    This is the crux of the matter and it shows how shallow right-wing arguments against affirmative action ring when invoking the words of those who fought for a more just society.

  12. John Rosenberg October 25, 2006 at 10:28 am | | Reply

    A lie? Actus (or actus), that is rather extreme, even for you. The problem for you and yours is that no matter how you attempt to spin it, giving people preferences based on their race is incompatible with treating people without regard to their race. But go ahead; argue all you want that it is necessary to discriminate in order to stop discriminating (when you tire of that, you could also try reviving the similar argument that it is necessary to destroy the village in order to save it). I admire King. I’ve freely acknowledged that had he lived there is no reason to believe he would remain loyal to the principle he evoked in his life, his movement, and his great speech any more than most of his followers were. Choose whatever verb you want for his probable or actual deviation from that principle.

    Hull – LBJ is worth even less effort to deconstruct than MLK. Still, you might want to take a look at two of his statements to put his shackled at the starting line comments in his Howard speech in context. First, several lines later in that same speech LBJ also said:

    For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. [Emphasis added]

    If that’s not clear enough as to his intention, three months after that speech he signed Executive Order 11246 which specified that government employers and contractors must

    take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. [Emphasis added]

    You are perfectly free to believe and argued that racial preferences are a Good Thing. You are not free to argue that they are compatible with opposition to judging people based on the color of their skin (King through 1965) or with LBJ’s view of what civil rights and “affirmative action” required.

    Since you no doubt also believe in a “living Constitution” whose meaning can change according to the views of later judges, you should not be bothered at all by the fact that you believe in a view of civil rights and affirmative action that is different from what civil rights advocates argued in their successful effort to write their (then) principles into law.

  13. actus October 25, 2006 at 11:36 pm | | Reply

    “A lie? Actus (or actus),”

    Could you let in the comment you’re responding to? Thanks.

    “he problem for you and yours is that no matter how you attempt to spin it, giving people preferences based on their race is incompatible with treating people without regard to their race.”

    King believed that to reach the goal of equality preferences were needed. You think that’s wrong.

  14. mj October 26, 2006 at 9:40 am | | Reply

    President Johnson made a similar statement in a 1965 speech at Howard University,

    “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others’, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

    This is the crux of the matter and it shows how shallow right-wing arguments against affirmative action ring when invoking the words of those who fought for a more just society.”

    Well, we may be shallow but at least we can follow logic. AA and RP do not redress actual discrimination, as Johnson describes. You might as well claim that evolutionists are incorrect because 2+2=4.

  15. […] (now back in 2012), as I noted here, two years after the above posts (but still almost six years ago), Thus in quoting King we honor […]

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    […] quoting King,” I wrote two years later in Hijacking A Civil Rights Hero, “we honor the principle he stood for, whether or not he would have continued to stand by […]

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