Giving False Testimony on King’s Views

Ward Connerly, a UC regent and chairman of last year’s Proposition 209 (the “California civil rights initiative”) campaign, chose the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Wednesday to announce a nationwide crusade to end affirmative action. At a press conference in Sacramento, Connerly said: “We must go back to the journey that King laid out.”

Unconcerned about public accountability, Connerly is contradicting the most trustworthy authority on King--the man himself. In recorded speeches, films, interviews and books, King left us a clear record of support for social engineering to achieve integration. In support of affirmative action, there is no body of literature more convincing, more relevant to our time, than his writings and speeches. (The essential works are contained in one large volume: “Testament of Hope,” edited by James Washington and published by Harper in 1996.) Here are excerpts:

* Reporter: “Do you feel it’s fair to request a multibillion dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or any other minority?”

Dr. King: “I do indeed . . . . Within common law, we have ample precedents for special compensatory programs. . . . America adopted a policy of special treatment for her millions of veterans . . . . They could negotiate loans from banks to launch businesses. They could receive special points to place them ahead in competition for civil service jobs . . . . There was no appreciable resentment of the preferential treatment being given to the special group.”

“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.”

“A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”

“Anatole France once said: ‘The law in its majestic equality forbids all men to sleep under benches--the rich as well as the poor.’ . . . France’s sardonic jest expresses a bitter truth. Despite new laws, little has changed . . . . The Negro is still the poorest American--walled in by color and poverty. The law pronounces him equal--abstractly--but his conditions of life are still far from equal.”

“Desegregation simply removes legal and social prohibitions. Integration is creative . . . more profound and far reaching than desegregation.”

* “Something positive must be done . . . . In 1863, the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, through an act of Congress it was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor . . . . Not only that, it provided agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day, thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every year not to farm.

“And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps . . .

“We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.”

“Integration is mutual sharing of power. . . . This is a multiracial nation where all groups are dependent on each other . . . . There is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity.”

* Certainly Connerly has a right to make a national case against affirmative action. Nor is it a crime to disagree with King openly and honestly. But Connerly, who opposes affirmative action and rejects King’s vision of shared power, should not pretend to be King’s missionary.

The real Martin Luther King Jr. was a “drum major for justice,” a man who fought and died for affirmative action to bring Americans together.

Paul Rockwell is a Bay Area librarian and writer.