The Dream, the Stars and Dr. King

Jesse Jackson

Last week in Memphis, we commemorated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King. He was struck down 27 years ago—not a dreamer, but a man of action. We have come a long way since then, in part as a fruit of his labors.

In less than 30 years, as schools opened and ceilings lifted, a large African American middle class has been created. High school graduation rates, even intelligence test results, grow closer between whites and blacks with each passing year.

The civil-rights movement that Dr. King led also helped women gain greater opportunity. The same laws that guarantee equal opportunity for African Americans apply to women, to other minorities, to the disabled. Our society benefits as fewer of its people have their genius suppressed or their talents wasted.

We have come a long way—but we have far to go. Commission after commission, report after report, show that systematic discrimination still stains our country.

African Americans have more difficulty obtaining business loans, buying homes, getting hired. Schools and housing patterns are still largely separate and unequal. Women still face glass ceilings in corporate offices. Ninety-seven percent of the corporate CEOs of the Fortune 500 are white men. That does not result from talent being concentrated among males with pale skin.

Today, Dr. King's legacy—the commitment to take affirmative actions to open doors and opportunity—is under political assault. Dr. King worked against terrible odds in a hopeful time. America was experiencing two decades of remarkable economic growth and prosperity. It was assumed, as the Kerner Commission made clear, that the "growth dividend" would enable us to reduce poverty and open opportunity relatively painlessly. But the war on poverty was never fought; instead, the dividend and the growth were squandered in the jungles of Vietnam.

Three decades later, the country is more prosperous but the times are less hopeful. Real wages for working people have been declining for 20 years. People are scared for good reason, as layoffs rise to record levels even in the midst of a recovery.

In this context, prejudice flourishes, feeding on old hates, keeping alive old fears. What else could explain the remarkably dishonest assault on affirmative-action programs that seek to remedy stubborn patterns of discrimination?

House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a history professor, sets the tone by simply erasing history. The Washington Post reported: "Gingrich dismissed the argument that those who benefit from affirmative action, commonly African Americans, have been subjected to discrimination over a period of centuries. That is true of virtually every American, Gingrich said, noting that the Irish were discriminated against by the English, for example."

As Roger Wilkins writes in a thoughtful essay in the Nation magazine, this is breathtakingly dishonest for a history professor. Blacks have been on the North American continent for nearly 375 years. For 245 of those, the country practiced slavery. For another 100 or so, segregation was enforced throughout the South and much of the North, often policed by home-grown terrorists. We've had only 30 years of something else, largely the legacy of the struggle led by Dr. King.

The media plays up the "guilt" African Americans supposedly suffer about affirmative action. I can tell you this. Dr. King felt no guilt when special laws gave us the right to vote. He felt no guilt about laws requiring that African Americans have the opportunity to go to schools, to enter universities, to compete for jobs and contracts. This supposed guilt is at best a luxurious anxiety of those who now have the opportunity to succeed or fail.

If Dr. King were alive today, he would be 66, younger than Senator Bob Dole who suggests that discrimination ended "before we were born." Unlike Dole, Dr. King would be working to bring people together, not drive them apart.

Modern-day conservatives haven't a clue about what to do with an economy that is generating greater inequality and reducing the security and living standards of more and more Americans. So they seek to distract and divide.

As Dole reaffirmed his abandonment of affirmative action, fellow Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas called for more cuts from the poor.

As we head into this troubling time, we would do well to remember Dr. King's legacy. No matter how desperate things were, no matter how grave the crisis, no matter how many times his dreams were shattered, Dr. King refused to grow bitter. Men and women, he taught, "have the capacity to do right as well as wrong, and[our] history is a path upward, not downward. It's only when it is truly dark that you can see the stars."