Would Martin Luther King Jr. Have Supported Affirmative Action?
Like Dinesh D’Souza, I’ve long thought that Martin Luther King Jr.—given his “I Have a Dream” speech, “that one day my four little children will grow up in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—would have opposed affirmative action. After all, a colorblind society should reject color-based policies.
But as Eric Foner shows in an essay for Slate from 1996, King most definitely would have supported the hand up:
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.”King said much the same thing in his last book. Where Do We Go From Here was published in 1967, and in the intervening four years, King’s optimism had given way to foreboding prompted by the emergence of a white backlash and the realization that combating the economic plight of black America would prove far more difficult than eliminating segregation. He called for a series of programs, including full employment and a guaranteed annual income, to uplift the poor of all races. But he saw no contradiction between measures aimed at fighting poverty in general and others that accorded blacks “special treatment” because of the unique injustices they had suffered. “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years,” he wrote, “must now do something special for him.”
Further, to compare Jim Crow to affirmative action is wrong and offensive:
Segregation was not simply a matter of racial classification (or “thinking by race,” as Justice Antonin Scalia has written) but part of a complex system of racial subordination whose political, economic, and social elements all reinforced one another. The slogan of the 1963 March on Washington was not colorblind laws but “Jobs and Freedom,” and the movement’s ultimate goal, King insisted, was to “make freedom real and substantive” for black Americans by absorbing them “into the mainstream of American life.”This goal remains as elusive today as it was during King’s lifetime. King’s real heirs are those who, like him, see affirmative action not as a panacea or an end in itself, but as one of many ways to reduce the gap between blacks and the rest of American society bequeathed to us by history.
Where does this leave me? I still oppose affirmative action, since explicitly taking account of race perpetuates racism, but it’s no longer a hot-button issue for me.
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
Scholars “use an intellectual scalpel…