On King’s actual birthday last Thursday, Bush announced that his Justice Department would file a brief in opposition to the University of Michigan affirmative action cases to be argued before the United States Supreme Court. In separate cases brought against an undergraduate unit and the law school, lower court judges were split, with one upholding the school’s affirmative program and the other rejecting it as unconstitutional.

“At their core, the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes perspective students, based solely on their race,” he incorrectly said. Shortly before midnight, the administration filed a 38-page brief that sided with the rejected White applicants who filed the suit.

Bush pretends to be acting in the spirit of Dr. King while rejecting the very programs that Dr. King favored.

First, let’s set the record straight. King said he had a dream that “one day” his four children “will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by content of their character.” He never said or implied that that day has arrived.

Conservatives are so conniving that they now quote Dr. King out of context. In their rush to wrap themselves in the cloak of the Nobel Prize winner, they never quote the section of his speech where he says, “America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”

To provide more opportunity for African-Americans, Dr. King was a strong supporter of affirmative action.

In an interview with “Playboy” magazine, King did not shy away from the loaded term “preferences.”

“Do you feel it’s fair to request a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group?” the interviewer asked.

“I do indeed,” King replied. “Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that 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 (emphasis on the word all) of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.”

In what can be interpreted as support for reparations, King added: “Within common law, we have ample precedents for special compensatory programs, which are regarded as settlements. American Indians are still being paid for land in a settlement manner. Is not two centuries of labor, which helped build this country, as a real commodity? Many other easily applicable precedents are readily at hand: our child labor laws, social security, unemployment compensation, manpower training programs.

“And you will remember that America adopted a policy of special treatment for her millions of veterans after the war—a program which cost far more than a policy of preferential treatment to rehabilitate the traditionally disadvantaged Negro would cost today.”

Dr. King wrote a series of reports for the “Nation” magazine. In one of them, reproduced in “A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr.,” edited by James M. Washington, he observed the enormous power of the Justice Department, which George W. Bush has mobilized against the interests of African-Americans.

“A Justice Department that is imbued with a will to create justice has vast potential,” he wrote. “The employment of powerful court orders, enforced by sizable numbers of federal marshals, would restrain lawless elements now operating with inexcusable license. It should be remembered that in early American history it was the federal marshal who restored law in frontier communities when local authority broke down.”

If Bush really wants to honor Dr. King, he would accept his suggestion on the role that the federal government should play.

“The purpose of this review is to emphasize that a recognition of the potentials of federal power is a primary necessity if the fight for full racial equality is to be won,” he wrote in that magazine article. “With it, however, must go another indispensable factor—the recognition by the government of its moral obligation to solve the problem.”
Rather than helping solve the problem, however, the Bush Administration has become part of the problem. That certainly was not part of Dr. King’s dream.