Martin Luther King Really Did Support Affirmative Action

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Yes, Henry Payne, Martin Luther King Really Did Support Affirmative Action*?* Deadline Detroit

Detroit News columnist Henry Payne took a moment yesterday to reflect upon the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington and carefully explains why he thinks King would be shocked and aghast by the civil rights movement's support for affirmative action.

Payne says King would oppose affirmative action because of the "not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character" line from his "I Have A Dream" speech. The problem is the historical record doesn't support that premise.

King also said and wrote a lot of other things in his all-too-brief lifetime, many of them offer support for what we now call affirmative action.


Slate: In Why We Can't Wait, published in 1963 as the movement to dismantle segregation reached its peak, King observed that many white supporters of civil rights "recoil in horror" from suggestions that blacks deserved not merely colorblind equality but "compensatory consideration." But, he pointed out, "special measures for the deprived" were a well-established principle of American politics. The GI Bill of Rights offered all sorts of privileges to veterans. Blacks, given their long "siege of denial," were even more deserving than soldiers of "special, compensatory measures."

Four years later King's words in the 1967 tract "Where Do We Go From Here" were even clearer on the subject: "A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him."

That kind of sounds like affirmative action. Now, true, you'll never see King refer to such compensatory policies as affirmative action and with good reason. Affirmative action as we know it was essentially created by the Nixon Administration (look up Arthur Fletcher and the Philadelphia Plan) in the years following King's assassination.

One is also unlikely to find John Quincy Adams writing about NASA. Adams, however, given his support for federally-funded scientific expeditions and research, it's unreasonable to assume (if he were alive in modern America) Adams would oppose NASA.

The same standard applies to King. Judging by the (ahem) content of speeches and writings, King believed special measures must be taken to level the racial playing field made uneven by centuries of slavery and institutional racism.

Whether or not affirmative action programs are necessary policies in 2013 is certainly a fair question. However, it cannot be answered by pulling a couple flowery quotes from a Martin Luther King speech and calling it a day.

We're better off leaving the words of history to history and focusing on the here and now, starting with the Brookings Institute's new report on social mobility among African-Americans.

Hannity and the rest of the Right forget that before someone killed MLK and made him into the worlds best and kindest black guy. The right and racist hated him and called him the same "race hustlers" etc that they do with other black leaders of today.

In fact there hasn't been ONE black leader that wasn't called a race hustler or a pimp of some kind. Maybe the right one hasn't come along....or....

 

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In 1967, Life magazine (4/21/67) dubbed King's prophetic anti-war address "demagogic slander" and "a script for Radio Hanoi." Even years later, Ronald Reagan described King as a near-Communist.

Today, however, a miracle is taking place: Suddenly, King is a conservative. By virtue of a snippit from one 1963 address--a single phrase about "the content of our character"--King is the most oft-quoted opponent of affirmative action in America today.

 

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LOL...I should've named this MLK the Republican....or something else completely false

 

[JakeStarkey]

King was not a communist and King despised far right conservative reactionaries.

He was right to do so: they killed him.

 

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King was not a communist and King despised far right conservative reactionaries.

He was right to do so: they killed him.

Yeah now they are trying to co-opt MLK into a republican now that he cant speak for himself. Good thing he did a bunch of interviews and wrote a lot but the right wants to forget that part of MLK

 

[bendog]

King was not a communist and King despised far right conservative reactionaries.

He was right to do so: they killed him.

Yeah now they are trying to co-opt MLK into a republican now that he cant speak for himself. Good thing he did a bunch of interviews and wrote a lot but the right wants to forget that part of MLK

Well, I'll chime in ... until the bigots show up.

Living in a southern city with african american elected officials, and local media who day in and out trumpet the old freedom marchers and voting rights activists of 50 years ago, I really didn't think the anniversary of "I have a dream" was of any importance ... beyond historical oddity. They are irrelevant when the city has a black on black murder rate surpassing Chicago's, and a middle class of all races fleeing to the suburbs.

But, maybe I'm wrong. I've heard old person after old person saying the "I have a dream" speech masked a lot of what King stood for. And, having grown up back then, though not in the South, I think that's really right. King was coming around to message of ending poverty and universal education. Stuff like a guaranteed income, which even Nixon toyed with. That stuff would go nowhere today. If King's record was really his stance on that, his import would be not so much.

I see black kids with solid educations who are getting aid packages that my kid can't dream of, which is ok. There's still a path for achieveing white kids, even if it involves the military for the working poor. The middle class is wide open to african americans ... if they earn it.

But the gop has fallen right back (yes it was the dems back then, but the dems morphed into gopers, and reformist gopers are long gone) into using nefarious laws to keep the poor, esp minorities, from voting. I have black bosses. Obama is potus. God knows my state GOP would flip for a black conservative ... though like other states, I see a lot of racist intent emerging in state politics. Not that it doesn't cut both ways. It does. But, the effect of the gop's efforts is that King's message in "I have a dream" is as relevant today as before.

And Goldwater, Reagan, BushI and even the boy warrior king wouldn't have gone here.