I Have A Dream:
In honor of MLK Day, here is Dr. King's famous speech delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963:
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Even as late as the 1960's, you could hardly call many southern states democracies. In terms of the daily lives of black people in the 1950's, Alabama, Mississippi, and most of the rest of the South appeared as democratic as the Soviet Union, at least on the surface. In both places, you could get killed, beaten up, or arrested merely for opposing the social order.
But unlike some of their contemporaries, King, Thurgood Marshall, and others saw through that. They fought to prove that the value of this country was worth fighting for, even when they were being firehosed, beat up, and lynched. That's patriotism.
When I face an unfair judge, I try remember how Thurgood Marshall fought for his clients in front of openly racist judges without ever dropping his standard of civility and decency. People like Marshall and King were patriots when being a patriot was really, really hard.
Thanks for posting the speach. It's a fitting MLK day tribute.
Considering that this is a legal blog, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this article. This was a court case in 1999.
Also, there were some questions about whether all the speech was original
Don't even go there. Don't try and usurp King's message for the conservative movement or try and hide his concern for workers' rights or adamant and loud opposition to the Vietnam War.
I'm glad to see the dream lives on.
1. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 20th century for America was the death of MLK.
2. Pity that we've gone from "I have a dream" to "I've got a subsidy".
3. As an asian I make it a point to checkmark "African-American" at all times. What? Are they going to check? How? How do you prove someone isn't African-American? And isn't any attempt to prove such a violation of my personal civil rights?
Frankly I think everyone, including those people so white that they glow in low light, should checkmark "African-American" when dealing with race questions.
I think you might be confusing that with the allegations of plagiarism for his dissertation and other academic papers.
Why? It seems to me that most of the “civil rights” movements (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP) has revealed themselves to be little more than professional race-baiters who are all in favor of government mandated discrimination so long as it “benefits” members of their race and only against it when it “harms” members of their race. By all account MLK (despite the oft-repeated “content of their character” line) was just as much in favor of government-mandated discrimination to say nothing of his support for using government to forcibly steal and redistribute wealth.
It seems to me that most of the power behind King’s “legacy” is owed to the fact that he died during his prime and the mythology behind his legacy is largely driven by one speech he delivered. Had King not been assassinated during his prime it is quite likely IMO he would have been regarded today as no different than Jackson, Sharpton, et al.
It is my understanding that part of the delay with the MLK Memorial in DC was the insistance that the family be given a royalty.
That's really a problem, and for the opposite reason you think.
King, right now, is an unassailable figure. You can't say anything against him or criticize him and expect to be listened to much, and if you do it in public, you'll be accused of wanting to bring back the segregation days.
Which is fine *if* King was only vocal about racial equality.
But as you've pointed out, that isn't true. King had opinions of other things. And unlike racial equality, these are topics where a legitimate difference of opinion exists.
Supporters of those ideas should not be able to twist "King needs to be respected for his views on racial equality" into "King needs to be respected for his views on socialism" (or the Vietnam War, or as some have interpreted King, affirmative action). But that's precisely what's happening here.
Went to a reunion of a civil rights group I served with in the mid-Sixties in Mississippi. Some of the earlier participants spoke and I was reminded of how scary the whole thing was. I had planned on enlisting, so it didn't seem to make much difference to me, but if it scared the guys, double props to the girls.
Who, as my wife pointed out, were looking to guys who were mostly Ghandi-ite anti-war, non-violent folks for protection.
It was also damned hard work.
So, J.F. You want to stop me?
King wanted people to be judged by the content of their character. That's about as rock-ribbed conservative as can be imagined, which is why J.F. doesn't want us to go there.
Tough. P.C. police may restrict our speech, but not our minds.
Tough.
At least one element of the conservative movement focuses on ideals worth conserving.
One of those ideals is explicit in the famous line of King's speech: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"
@ Winston: Even if King did not fully live that dream, he spoke of a dream that, at its root, conserves important ideals of the American experiment.
Reminds me of a story the Park Service attorneys told me. Some years ago (I heard the tale around the late 1980s) a Klan unit proposed to hold a protest, within sight of MLK's grave, on MLK day. Whoever administers the site had a simple response. Yes, you have a perfect first amendment right to do so. But I'm afraid all our security people are tied up that day and will be unable to offer any protection to you. The Klan withdrew its application for the permit.
Reminds me also of how the day became a federal holiday, a perfect example of how policymakers often have no idea how to make policy. There had been a big push for it, and lots of resistance based on "giving federal employees a day off will cost the taxpayer XXX million dollars (in salaries paid, but no work done)."
Then the Redskins won the Superbowl, and the Reagan Admin. gave everyone a day or half a day off to greet the returning team.
Needless to say, there was some comment about the inconsistency of asserting the King holiday could not created due to its high cost, and allowing everyone time off to greet a football team.
And? How does that not violate their First Amendment rights? Just because the Park Service didn't use the words "we're denying the permit"?
If it was civil rights protestors wanting to march, and they were told "well, you can march through our town, but we're terribly sorry, all our police are elsewhere and if someone tries to beat you up you have to handle that yourself", would that violate their first amendment rights? Particularly if the claim about police was a transparent lie?
What total nonsense.
Conservatives fought King and the Civil Rights movement every inch of the way. The leading conservatives of the day, both politicians and commentators, were downright scornful, or worse, of King. Go see what Buckley was writing, for example.
This opposition remains a giant blot on the history of American conservatism. Efforts to claim King's legacy as a conservative one willfully ignore plain history, and are laughably dishonest.
Alternatively, this is the greatest testament to King. Some of his opponents have been convinced by his words and deeds, and have integrated them into their core philosophies.
Well and good. But let them say that, and admit the historical facts about conservatism and the Civil Rights movement, rather than making ridiculous claims about King being a conservative.
Careful, there. I didn't say King was a conservative. I said that his character content piece was conservative.
As to resistance, see the votes on the Civil Rights Act, as percentages of party.
If his comments were so conservative, why did conservatives overwhelmingly oppose him?
Talking about the percentage of party votes on the Civil Rights Act is a tired and foolish argument.
First of all, I said "conservatives," not "Democrats." If you want to pretend that the southern Democrats who opposed the Act weren't conservatives, then go ahead, but don't ask to be taken seriously.
Second, it was support of Civil Rights by northern Democrats that turned the southern Democrats into Republicans, who welcomed them and their racism with open arms.
All this has been rehashed so many times on so many blogs and elsewhere that I would think the argument was long dead, but I guess some people cling to whatever they can find.
Conservatives have adopted King's stated position that race should not be counted against someone. For this they are lambasted as racists.
King is collectively remembered almost solely for his "I have a dream" speech. Anything else he stood for counts for next to nothing.
I'm conservative as hell, always have been, and I spent two summers in Mississippi when the folks who talk stoutly of "the struggle" were pissing their pants at the thought of going south of Cincinnati.
I am not taking particular credit for this, considering my plans meant I didn't have much to lose. But it is still a fact.
And the vitriol aimed at the content of character idea is because it threatens affirmative action and any other group identity scheme. Imagine a college admissions officer being told to count only the content of an applicant's character. He'd have to have therapy. As would liberals.
Except of course that there are no “historical facts” being offered here and the claim that Southern Democrats became Republicans over civil rights is laughably false.
I know you think it's inconvenient, but the voting pattern is a fact. Too bad.
More BS. Senate Democrats voted 46-21 in favor, Representatives were 152-96 in favor.
Virtually all the Democratic "No" votes came from southerners - you know, the conservatives. Only a few Republican Senators opposed the bill, true. Of course, one was Goldwater - the Republican nominee for President and member of the conservative pantheon - who carried five southern states along with Arizona.
Again, all this has been pointed out endlessly.
Too bad for you. Northern Dems voted 45-1 for the Civil Rights Act, Northern Republicans 27-5.
Thorley,
What is laughable is the attempts to rewrite history, and your willingness to believe them. The South turned Republican over civil rights. No amount of stretches and twists and rationalizations and whatnot can change that. Believe all the rewrites and rationalizations you want. That's what happened.
Also, I don't care how people felt in the '60's. I wasn't born until the late '70's. I didn't start forming my own political opinions until the early 90's. So, to me, Bush 41 was a conservative, Perot was an independent, and Clinton was a liberal. Reagan? A distant memory. So if I choose to identify as a conservative, it is of a different vintage than those you are complaining about, and I see no reason why I should apologize for those that had no direct impact on my choice of political views.
And, for what it is worth, most people around me consider me a liberal.
Agreed, it’s one of the things that makes Bernard Yomtov’s claim so bizarre. If Southern Democrats had really “switched parties” over the Civil Rights Act, it makes no sense for them to align itself with the political party that was more inclined to support federal civil rights legislation. Add to that the fact that the political realignment of the South from Democrat to Republican occurred some 30-40 years (1-2 generations) after the Civil Rights Acts and the “Southern Democrats became Republicans over civil rights” is nothing more than a smear.
No. I merely think they shouldn't lie about recent events. I stated a simple fact. The conservatives of the Civil Rights era were vigorously opposed to the Civil Rights movement. To deny that is psychotic. The evidence is overwhelming.
If today's conservatives recognize that that was a mistake, terrific. If they don't want to discuss it, out of embarrassment perhaps, that's OK. But when they begin to deny it, and start pretending that people like Richard Russell and James Eastland and so on were liberals, I will object.
Thorley,
That really is a hopelessly stupid comment. Can you truly not do simple arithmetic? The reason the Republican percentage was higher was precisiely because the Democratic percentage included the southern votes.
Adding the southern Democratic vote to the Republican vote gives 28-26 in favor, a bare majority, while northern Democrats, as I noted above, were 45-1 in favor.
That's it. I'm done. Believe what you want, Thorley.
The political left and the political right have both been wrong about various things in history, but to pretend that the mainstream conservative movement was not wrong about MLK and the civil rights movement is absurd (assuming we believe that opposing said movement was, in fact, wrong).
Oh, and MLK believed in affirmative action as well. It's entirely consistent to believe in that and in the "content of their charcters."
Hubert Humphrey said that if his view of affirmative action turned into quotas, he'd eat the bill in the well of the House. Or so goes the story.
In respect of a great man, the morph to quotas was delayed by about fourteen seconds.
The original AA was what could be described as accelerated or targeted outreach, with the goal of increasing the chance that the most qualified person would be a minority type. It did not envision trashing the low-bid process, or race-norming ability tests, or giving extra points for melanin.
When pigs fly.
What would be the difference between your plan and means-tested scholarships, or welfare, or tax credits?
The education-based assistance seems kind of odd. The connection between accumulated classroom seat time and income is clear, but the reverse is not. The rotorooter guy came last week and got $150 for about forty-five minutes' work. The Maytag guy gets $85 for knocking on the door.
We are having some serious remodeling done. The carpenter's cash flow exceeds ours, not even including our contribution to his lifestyle. Does he get education-based assistance?
But, anyway, what makes you think any of the champions would give up the racial aspect of affirmative action before it's pulled from their cold, dead hands?
Our worst, except for the nineteenth century, when blacks were actually enslaved, and the US was making sure to subjugate or exterminate the remaining Indians. Other than that, worst ever!
- Josh
I'm one of those lefties who thinks that public higher education should be cheap enough that very few scholarships should be necessary. As for private schools, they should provide economic assistence based on economic need (if they want to -- they should want to, by the way). Sadly, we don't seem to have much money for anything anymore, so means-testing seems pretty sensible across the board.
I phrased my post badly. I meant consideration of an applicant's schooling opportunities in college admission.
Oh, I'm sure some won't. Just like their most vitriolic opponents, their outrage has an audience.
Still, I can't figure out why you don't think it's worth finding out if that audience might prefer a different show...
But you have to admit that there's a bit of difference between the impact of a holiday that comes once in a lifetime and that of one that comes every year. Or do you think that Gibbs is finally going to turn the Skins around next season?
A lot of those folks weren't conservative on anything *but* civil rights. Not every Southern Democrat was another Harry Byrd. There were, for example, Lister Hill, J. William Fulbright, Sam Ervin, Wilbur Mills, Hale Boggs, and perhaps Al Gore, Sr. (who didn't sign the Southern Manifesto, but did vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964). (And if you go back earlier, to the late 19th and early 20th century, you'll find that many of the same people who were amending their state constitutions to impose literacy tests and poll taxes in order to bleach the electorate were also pushing such decidedly non-conservative causes as regulation of the railroads and other corporations.)
OTOH, the connection between the racist conservative movement of the 1950's and 1960's to the conservative movement of today is fairly close, as you can even find the same people involved in both (see William F. Buckley) and racist Southern Democrats who stayed involved in politics until modern times actually switched parties (see Strom Thurmond).
They didn't all switch. For example, there were senators like Robert Byrd, Russell Long, Fritz Hollings, and John Stennis. "No," you may say, "they ceased to be racists." How, I would ask, do you conclude that Strom Thurmond didn't? The fact that he became a Republican?
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=17060
Best, H.
I live in Michigan and we just passed Prop 2, outlawing racial preferences. You ought to hear the "audience" howl. They don't want a different show. So there's your answer. The states, little laboratories.
How do you take educational opportunities into account? Do you give a kid with abysmal test scores and grades extra points because he went to a lousy school? And if you do admit him because of those extra points, how do you get him through the first semester?
Or do you have some other plan?
There is more, both in the post and the comments. Prof. Kerr, thank you for posting the video.
However. I went to a reunion of the civil rights group with which I worked, which was begun at Michigan State University. King gave a speech/sermon there. The King family is pretty tight with that stuff. I understand you can't even get a transcript. But the university library figured out a way to get a recording for us, as long as we didn't copy it and gave it back right away.
Even given the facts of our case, and all the history in which King was involved, the speech was a snoozer. He had a couple of clever allusions, and got into the rhythm of the black preacher--which is not my thing--and so forth. Let me just guess that NR saw him five years or so before he got to MSU and he was nervous or restrained. They were wrong about his future, but they were right about the other stuff.
King's position on affirmative action is well documented. For example, a link on the Wikipedia entry for MLK contains the following info:
---
King was even more clear on so-called "preferential treatment"—what we now typically refer to as affirmative action. Although it is true that King called for universal programs of economic and educational opportunity for all the poor, regardless of race, he also saw the need for programs targeted at the victims of American racial apartheid. In 1961, after visiting India, King praised that nation's "preferential" policies that had been put in place to provide opportunity to those at the bottom of the caste system, and in a 1963 article in Newsweek, published the very month of the "I Have a Dream" speech, King actually suggested it might be necessary to have something akin to "discrimination in reverse" as a form of national "atonement" for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
The most direct articulation of his views on the subject is found in his 1963 classic Why We Can't Wait, in which King noted:
"Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential 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 for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it 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."
In his 1967 volume, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?, King was even more explicit when he said "A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis."
In 1965, during an interview with Playboy, King spelled out what "something special" might entail, and it was far more substantive than affirmative action. In fact, King stated his support for an aid package for black America in the amount of $50 billion. As King explained:
"...for two centuries the Negro was enslaved and robbed of any wages—potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America's wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation."
Although some might consider the differing interpretations of King's views regarding affirmative action or color-blindness to be mere debate, the fact is that the claims of King's hostility to any race-conscious effort—claims which are evidently counter to his true beliefs—have had an impact on public policy and the national debate over affirmative action. For example, during the ultimately successful campaign in California to eliminate racial "preferences," supporters of Proposition 209 conjured the image of King repeatedly and, until criticized by the King family, had been planning to air a TV spot showing the "content of their character" segment of King's "Dream" speech. According to Lydia Chavez, in The Color-Bind: California's Battle to End Affirmative Action, the voice-over for the ad said: "Martin Luther King was right. Bill Clinton is wrong to oppose Proposition 209. Let's get rid of all preferences."
Similarly, Louisiana Governor Mike Foster eliminated certain affirmative action programs in that state upon taking office in 1996. According to Ellis Cose in Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World, as Foster signed the legislation outlawing a handful of race-conscious programs, he noted: "This just says we've got to be color-blind...Dr. King believed all men should be judged by their character, not by the color of their skin." Foster went so far as to say that he "could find nothing in King's writing" that would indicate King would have disagreed with his actions that day, leading one to wonder just how much of King's work the governor had actually read.
By now, the transfer payments to the African American community vastly, grossly exceed the $50 billion, even accounting for inflation.
So that's taken care of.
My question, though, is whether King would have supported points for melanin, one of the contentious issues in college admissions.
The problem with not getting the best guy you can for a job is that the job has to be done. It's more than a paycheck. There needs to be a result. In large cities, the government mostly deals with minorities. So any reduction in efficiency due to providing points for melanin have an adverse impact on services provided to minorities. It's not a one-sided coin.
Years ago, the president of Rutgers, in defending his plan to make lowered admissions standards for blacks permanent instead of the then temporary without an endpoint, let slip. "What about the genetics.....oooohhh shit." I paraphrase. He spent some time after that slobbering all over himself for saying what he really meant. Careful who you associate with when they claim they only want to help you.
I read Cose's "Rage of The Privileged Class". He made a couple of howlers which caused me to think he wasn't worth following any longer.
The *merits* of various types of affirmative action plans are, of course, fair subjects for debate. I was just trying to clarify what MLK's position was, at least in principle.
Thank you.
"Let justice roll down like waters." The prophet Amos.
"Every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together." Isaiah.
"Five score years ago..." Echoes Lincoln.
"'We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal.'" Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence.
It is hard to find words for the foolishness of calling this plagiarism. I read this thread of heartless comments, with so little care for the questions of justice we face, and I fear for the future of our country.
Did you read the link? Nobody's said it's plagiarism because he stole from the Bible or Lincoln.
Elais: They aren't interested in eliminating it. It preserves their power structure. If everyone who complains about discrimination is lazy/a liar/a slut/a race baiter (the list can go on forever) then they don't have to believe discrimination exists, and the fact that they are no black law partners at their firm just means that enough blacks aren't interested in the law.
So the 80s don't count as "modern times"? What are they, then, medieval? (I suppose if Ronald Reagan is the first president you remember--or even worse, if you don't remember when Reagan was president--then the answer is yes. But for those of us for whom 'twas bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven, the Reagan years were plenty modern.)