As an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1960s I was privileged to take a small class with then-visiting Sociology professor St. Clair Drake, co-author of the classic Black Metropolis. One day he asked me and a couple of other students to join him at a table in the student union, interrupting something he’d been writing. When I asked what he was writing, he said a draft of a letter he planned to send to the New York Times — about an article that had not yet been written about an event, something to do with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah (with whom he was a close advisor) that had not yet happened. (I suspect it was this letter.)

As you can see, that event stuck with me, and now I would like to take a page out of Professor Drake’s book and criticize a speech by President Obama that, as I write (Friday night, May 6), I have not read because it won’t be delivered until tomorrow at the Howard University commencement.

In his speech Obama is almost certain to quote all or part of the following passage from another presidential commencement speech at Howard — “To Fulfill These Rights,” by President Lyndon Johnson on June 4, 1965. Under the heading “Freedom Is Not Enough, LBJ famously declared:

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

That passage is widely cited both as the beginning of and justification for the abandonment of colorblindness and turn toward racial preferences, and I suspect Obama may refer to it in a similar manner.

But take another look at LBJ’s speech. The “equality as a result” he sought is not at all the same thing as the “equality of results” demanded by today’s proponents of “disparate impact” proportionalism. What Johnson meant by “equality,” it is quite clear, is non-discriminatory equality of opportunity.

The evidence? For starters, the very next sentence in Johnson’s speech, after the oft-quoted passage quoted above, states:

For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. [Emphasis added]

True, Johnson then says in the following sentence that “equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough,” but in the remainder of the speech he does not specify what more is needed, other than various forms of assistance there is no reason to assume would be conditioned on skin color as opposed to need.

Moreover, three months after his Howard speech, Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, which required “affirmative action” of government contractors. But note how that order defined “affirmative action”:

The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. [Emphasis added]

Whatever LBJ thought at the time, and whatever he might have thought had he lived to see the regime of racial preference Democrats proceeded to inflict upon the nation, there is no reason to treat his Howard speech as calling for the abandonment of the “without regard” principle he affirmed in his Executive Order three months later.

POST-SPEECH UPDATE

Well, I was wrong. The speech has now been delivered, and there’s not one word in it about LBJ’s Howard commencement address, no doubt the most quoted and influential commencement address every given at Howard. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Obama didn’t want to share the stage, even for a moment, by mentioning his predecessor who signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and did so much for civil rights … as it was formerly understood.

For response to the actual speech, see my comments here.