Waiting for Equality
Martin Luther King’s agenda did not include racial preferences.

By Roger Clegg, general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity & NRO contributing editor
April 14-15, 2001

artin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 33 years ago this month, on April 4, 1968. It's an appropriate time to consider

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in retrospective his book Why We Can't Wait, first published in 1964 and listed on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best nonfiction English-language books of the twentieth century.

The book is about the events of 1963. King stresses that this was the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and that, 100 years after Lincoln had freed the slaves, it was simply unbearable for blacks to remain subject to state oppression. He describes the use of civil disobedience — of "nonviolent direct action" — to confront arch-segregationist Eugene "Bull" Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety, to desegregate Birmingham, "the most segregated city in America." There are moments of high drama and great pathos, cameo appearances by later notables like Andrew Young, and brief character sketches of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. The intellectual and literal center of the book is chapter five, King's deeply moving "Letter from Birmingham Jail." With modesty that would be unthinkable for a civil-rights leader today, King describes the 1963 March on Washington without mentioning at all his "I Have a Dream" speech.

There is much in the book that will please today's conservatives. One is moved, of course, by King's firsthand description of the oppression of segregation and the evil of racial discrimination. Yet it is also clear that this was principally, although not exclusively, a government evil. Without the state's power — that is, had discrimination been simply a phenomenon of the private sector — it is obvious that the civil-rights movement would have had a much easier, less bloody time of it. (This is also clear from the discussion of the era in the magisterial America in Black and White by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom.)

One is also struck by how strongly Christian the book is. The language and metaphors are rich and return again and again to the Bible and, in particular, the New Testament and teachings of Christ. King quotes Jesus, Amos, Paul, Martin Luther, and John Bunyan. He has no use for Elijah Muhammad's Muslims. How sad it is that now there are those on the Left who would raise eyebrows at his reference to "infanticide." In a 1998 essay, Douglas Brinkley called King "a gifted prose stylist, although one who takes his lead from the New Testament and his Baptist preacher's pulpit." "Although?"

There is much patriotism in the book, and the ideals of the civil-rights movement are justified as much by the desirability of freedom as they are by a cry for equality. King quotes Lincoln and Jefferson, refers to the "founding fathers," and concludes his famous letter from Birmingham jail with a reference to "our great nation." King even refers to "our beloved Southland."

King's philosophy is also quite conservative in this sense: He does not believe in the inevitability of progress. "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God…." He even quotes T.S. Eliot on a couple of occasions. In condemning the "psychology of servitude" he sounds like John McWhorter or Shelby Steele.

The edition of the book that I read (Signet Classic paperback, $6.50) included an "Afterword" by Jesse Jackson. I expected that the book itself would be politically unassailable, with references to colorblindness and the like, and that Jackson's "Afterword" would be demagogic claptrap. But the book — despite its power and the strengths just listed — was more problematic than I had thought it would be, and Jackson's ten pages were a pleasant surprise. I would have predicted that the "Afterword" would focus entirely on the "unfinished business" of the civil-rights movement, to the exclusion of the almost total victory it had achieved; in fact, it was entirely the reverse, with the astonishing bonus that Jackson mentions himself only once. And he even refers to the "oppression of communism"!

King writes a lot about "economic injustice." He refers to "economic exploitation" and "economic oligarchy," criticizing conditions in the North as well as the South. The book shows its age in some places. There are lots of references to the evils of "colonialism" and the jobs lost to "automation." (And, of course, there is King's use of the quaint term "Negro" — not black, not African American or Afro-American — to refer to his race.) King was, in other words, a rather uninspired and conventional liberal in most respects. His genius was limited to civil rights in America — but that was enough to make him a great leader.

The book is dedicated to King's children, "for whom I dream that one day soon they will no longer be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." This is of course the phrase from the "I Have a Dream" speech that anti-preference conservatives love to quote, and pro-preference liberals hate to hear.

Pro-preference liberals assert that King himself did support or would have supported racial preferences — a.k.a. "affirmative action" — and so it is wrong to use this quote against them. The best answer is that King was eloquently stating a principle, and that preferences are flatly inconsistent with that principle, whether King saw it or not. Jefferson's words, "all men are created equal," are inconsistent with slavery, and one who says so cannot be attacked on the grounds that Jefferson owned slaves.

And did King support, or would he have supported, racial preferences? I am not an expert on all that King wrote and said, but I can say that Why We Can't Wait is ambiguous on this point. In the key section of the book's last chapter, King advocates "some compensatory consideration for the handicaps [the Negro] has inherited from the past." He draws an analogy to preferences that were given in India to the untouchables and to "special points" that were given to veterans in this country after World War II. African Americans are therefore entitled to "a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures that could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law." Sounds like preferences at least, indeed maybe even reparations, right?

But then King calls this proposal "a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged." And he adds this crucial point: "While Negroes form the vast majority of America's disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill." He concludes, "It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor."

This, of course, is part of the anti-preference mantra: Go ahead and give special help to the disadvantaged if you like, but if you do, give it to the disadvantaged of all races. Give admission preferences to students from substandard schools, or contractors with small companies, or employees who have overcome great personal obstacles — but don't assume that all blacks, or only blacks, fit into these categories.

However one interprets these few paragraphs at the end of the book, a larger point is obvious from the bulk of Why We Can't Wait that precedes them: The power of King's vision, the moral force of the civil-rights movement, the persuasiveness of King's words — all of this would have evaporated if preferential treatment had been part of the agenda. Even if one favors preferences, they are clearly not free from moral ambiguity, and such ambiguity would have been fatal to what King sought to, and did, accomplish.

It is now the Left that stubbornly clings to the use of preferences, asserting that we must not be impatient, that the government cannot be colorblind until all people are — i.e., never. And it is conservatives who can't wait, who insist that the longer the government discriminates, the worse it is for all of us, and that our laws, by reflecting our ideals, can help transform reality.