Last week, my son was tasked with memorizing and reciting the final paragraphs of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" (1963) speech for his class.  I am proud that he did so, because, like most Americans, I've always been fond of the speech. 

Also like most Americans, I grew up knowing little else about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. beyond the fact that he was a prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement who became a martyr when he was assassinated in 1968.  His legacy, I believe, is largely predicated upon the words and power of his most famous speech, which beautifully conveys broad moral truths while marking few actual positions that would give someone pause to object politically.  

Making any political assumptions about the meaning behind the words in MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech is tricky and can create confusion.  For example, at CNN, John Blake attempts to debunk the biggest myths about MLK, asking his readers if they remember the most famous line of his "I Have a Dream" speech: "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."

"Conservatives sure do [remember that line]," Blake writes.  "Some of them cite those words as evidence that King opposed affirmative action."

It's not hard to understand why a conservative might assume, based upon those plain words and their context in the speech, that there is no way that MLK could have supported a racist concept like affirmative action.  After all, affirmative action is entirely inconsistent with the meaning of those words.  Affirmative action is nothing more or less than institutional judgment based upon skin color in order to distribute opportunity.  It is, quite openly, not a judgment based upon merit or the content of one's character, but perceived as institutionally applied restitution for past wrongdoings against people of a specific skin color. 

Blake, however, argues that whatever one chooses to take away from those words in the speech, MLK was actually very much in favor of affirmative action.  And he quotes MLK as having said so in his book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967).  Blake writes, "King said that a 'society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.'"

That's a disturbing sentence, when you consider it in the context of the first sentence that Blake referenced from MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, because there is simply no way possible to morally reconcile the two competing beliefs that Americans should not be "judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" with the statement that American "society must do something special for the Negro."  It is utterly impossible to embrace both ideas as a morally acceptable path forward. 

More importantly, it highlights a contrast between the ideas of our most famous civil rights activist in American history, MLK, and the ideas of America's greatest civil rights activist: Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass circa 1879 (via National Archives).

In the 1960s, MLK suggested that the American government should "do something special for the Negro" because of past wrongdoings.  In 1865, Frederick Douglass had a message that was nothing short of the opposite in his speech, "What the Black Man Wants."

"I am not asking for sympathy at the hands of abolitionists, sympathy at the hands of any," said Douglass.  He continued:

I think the American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just[.] ... [I]n regard to the colored people there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested toward us. What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.

What, precisely, did Douglass mean by "justice"?  He goes on, not speaking in morally abstract tones, but in bold and specific ones:

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! ... And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

In the end, both MLK and Frederick Douglass demanded that Americans be judged by the content of their character rather than skin color, and that this would lead to racial justice and freedom.  While we should all remember the fantastic speech made by MLK in 1963, perhaps it'd be better if more of us remembered the brilliant and timeless ideas of a man who, nearly 100 years before, laid out the method by which we all might truly be appraised as free people, and a society in which we all might be judged by the content of our character rather than our skin color, or sex, or any other means of separation that human beings might create in our seemingly infinite moral fallibility.