It Didn't Start
With Martin
Ignorance of
history corrupts today's debate over "civil rights."
Leaders cry
for continued affirmative action, set-asides, race-based admissions,
and other programs in order to "level the playing field."
But well before
the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case or any of the landmark
civil rights legislation of the mid-60s, blacks made tremendous
social, political and economic progress. Blacks went from near illiteracy
following emancipation to nearly 70% literacy a few decades later.
So many blacks voted in the twenties, thirties, and forties, that
many politicians, especially Northerners, had to take into consideration
the interest of black voters to get elected.
Economist Tom
Sowell writes that, contrary to popular belief, the pace of black
income growth did not increase following the enactment of the civil
rights legislation and of affirmative action policies.
The income gap
between the average black man and the average white man began to
narrow well before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and today black
college-educated professional women now out-earn their white counterparts
by nearly 10%.
Here's the way
the game works. Proponents of affirmative action like to quote Martin
Luther King. His writings do, in fact, suggest support of something
like affirmative action:
"Whenever the
issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of
our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality,
they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this
appears reasonable, but it is not realistic," and "...Now there
is another myth that still gets around; it is a kind of over reliance
on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that
if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise
out of slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and
segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro
must lift himself by his own bootstraps.
"They never
stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American
soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation
made the black man's color a stigma; but beyond this they never
stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery
244 years."
Strongly dissenting,
however, from this "you owe us" view, was Booker T. Washington.
His important autobiography, Up From Slavery, was published in 1900,
a mere 35 years after emancipation. For historical perspective,
think of slavery having ended in 1962, and the book having been
published today.
Note the following
passages make no reference to government obligations, guilt, racism,
or special privilege: "In those days, and later as a young man,
I used to try to picture in my imagination the feelings and ambitions
of a white boy with absolutely no limit placed upon his aspirations
and activities. I used to envy the white boy who had no obstacles
placed in the way of his becoming a Congressman, Governor, Bishop,
or President by reason of the accident of his birth or race. I used
to picture the way that I would act under such circumstances; how
I would begin at the bottom and keep rising until I reached the
highest round of success.
"In later years,
I confess that I do not envy the white boy as I once did. I have
learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position
that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome
while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost
reach the conclusion that often the Negro boy's birth and connection
with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned.
With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform
his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition.
But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled
to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose
pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.
"From any point
of view, I had rather be what I am, a member of the Negro race,
than be able to claim membership with the most favored of any other
race. I have always been made sad when I have heard members of any
race claiming rights and privileges, or certain badges of distinction,
on the ground simply that they were members of this or that race,
regardless of their own individual worth or attainments. I have
been made to feel sad for such persons because I am conscious of
the fact that mere connection with what is known as a superior race
will not permanently carry an individual forward unless he has individual
worth, and mere connection with what is regarded as an inferior
race will not finally hold an individual back if he possesses intrinsic,
individual merit. Every persecuted individual and race should get
much consolation out of the great human law, which is universal
and eternal, that merit, no matter under what skin found, is, in
the long run, recognized and rewarded. This I have said here, not
to call attention to myself as an individual, but to the race to
which I am proud to belong.
He goes on:
"...When a Negro girl learns to cook, to wash dishes, to sew, to
write a book, or a Negro boy learns to groom horses, or to grow
sweet potatoes, or to produce butter, or to build a house, or to
be able to practice medicine, as well or better than some one else,
they will be rewarded regardless of race or color. In the long run,
the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race,
religion, or previous history will not long keep the world from
what it wants.
"I think that
the whole future of my race hinges on the question as to whether
or not it can make itself of such indispensable value that the people
in the town and the state where we reside will feel that our presence
is necessary to the happiness and well-being of the community. No
man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual,
and moral well-being of the place in which he lives is long left
without proper reward. This is a great human law which cannot be
permanently nullified."
In short, two
good hard hours of homework every night makes the debate over affirmative
action a non-event.
Yet people seldom
quote Washington, whose writings are every bit as profound and compelling
as Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech.
Washington was
born a slave, but was freed upon emancipation at age 9. He was raised
in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor. He taught himself to read,
and later worked in a salt furnace. His father would not allow him
to attend school, arguing that he needed to work.
Washington learned
of a special school for blacks, and wanted to go, but his father
would not let him leave the salt furnace. So Washington convinced
a teacher to teach him at night. He later attended Hampton Institute,
where he worked as a janitor to pay his $10-a-month boarding fee.
Martin Luther
King, by contrast, grew up middle-class. Washington was a slave-turned-poor-freedman.
Think a contemporary
Booker T. Washington would have much stomach for set-asides, race-based
admissions, the race card, or Ebonics? Me neither.
Larry Elder