I was four months and one day shy of my 12th birthday when my Aunt Margaret urged me to listen to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Of course, neither she nor I knew at the time the speech would be known as “I Have A Dream.” Aunt Margaret was watching the Aug. 28, 1963, March On Washington event on the television. When King strode to the podium, she made extra sure I was paying attention.
Normally on a summer day, I’d have been outdoors romping with neighborhood kids playing tag, shooting marbles or just getting into assorted mischief. I have no idea why I was indoors that particular day.
But I’m glad I was. When King wrapped up his speech with the immortal words, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!”
I had the inkling that I’d just witnessed a historic moment. Those words have stuck with me through the years, as have these:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Somewhere during the past 48-plus years that part of King’s dream got derailed. Whatever happened to the concept of judging people by “the content of their character?” Wasn’t King hoping that skin color would have less meaning, not more, by the year 2012?
My guess is that he was. And, over the years, it’s been liberals, more so than conservatives, who’ve done their darnedest to torpedo that part of King’s dream.
Let’s take the affirmative action programs that liberals have turned into blatant racial quotas as an example.
President Kennedy issued his executive order 10925 in 1963. President Johnson issued his executive order 11246 in 1965.
Both are about affirmative action, and have this in common: they required that things be done without regard to race.
It wasn’t long before liberals wanted to move the goal posts on affirmative action. They insisted that things be done with regard to race, and not just in employment.
They extended their racial preference zeal to education, insisting that colleges and universities had to have a certain number of “underrepresented minorities” on campus.
The late James Farmer, who was head of the Congress of Racial Equality when King led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, saw the problem with this.
Farmer didn’t give the knee-jerk response many of today’s so-called “civil rights leaders” have to whites who oppose affirmative action. (Which is to dismiss them as racist.)
“The integration vs. segregation battle was a case of right versus wrong,” Farmer told a group of students at Baltimore’s Gilman School many years ago. “With affirmative action, it’s a case of right vs. right.”
Farmer sounds like a man who had quite a bit of “content of character” himself. I wonder what he would make of today’s current crop of black liberals, who can’t let a day pass without whining about the numbers of black men in prisons or jails.
The whiners whine so much they can’t even get their facts straight on this one. They love to claim that there are more black men in prison than in colleges or universities.
Black folks more grounded in reality have cited figures proving the opposite, and claim that black men ages 18-24 and in colleges and universities outnumber those in prison by a ratio of four to one.
But doesn’t committing a crime and ending up in prison say something about the content of a person’s character? Do liberals need new victims so much that they’ll dredge them up from anywhere?
And kill the concept of “content of character” with their zeal?
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
