Many bad things are neither un-freedom nor unconstitutional

MLK's "I have a dream" speech.

Though MLK said so, saying didn’t make it so.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 

This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. 

It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.

How not?

He cites three particulars.

But these three things are not un-freedom and if overcome no one would be the more free for that.

Well, the first two, anyway.

His description of a purported third lacks all but emotive content, anyway.

Correction,  08282013, 2007 hrs EDT.

Ah, a reference to racial exclusion of blacks in employment and public accommodations.

Not unfreedom and addressed by legal compulsion, long since. 

End Correction. 

The first has been a done deal for a very long time.

One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.

One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

He goes on to a manifest falsehood.

Likening the Declaration’s assertions that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to a check written to its people by the nation’s founders he says, for the black people of America even up to the very day on which he spoke, it has been a “bad check” returned for “insufficient funds.”

So far as I can tell, the equality asserted in the Declaration excludes hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as well as slavery, insisting upon equal rights of “all men,” particularly including the three cited, but no more than that.

And no state when King spoke denied black Americans that equality or those rights, which do not exclude either legally mandated segregation or private (or public) discrimination.

On the other hand, the courts at that time had for long tolerated various mechanisms by which the 15^th Amendment guaranteeing voting rights to the freedmen was frustrated.

Section 1.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2.

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Efforts to make that stick during Reconstruction failed and were eventually abandoned.

That would be fixed during the 1960’s.

King in this speech threatens,

[T]here will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

But those had not been withheld, though for long the Negroes of America had been denied the equal protection, the very literal equal protection of the law, fruitlessly guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment.

That, too, was ending.

He goes on.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" 

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. 

We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

As to that about brutality, he was mostly in the right.

But in part this was a complaint against arrests intentionally sought in an extensive and well-publicized campaign of civil disobedience directed against both legally mandated segregation – pretty much torn apart by Brown and its judicial echoes and expansions – and legally allowed private discrimination in public accommodations.

And as to the latter, there was nothing in the constitution to guarantee access, regardless of race or other factors, to anyone.

Still isn’t.

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

As to the first, he was on solid ground and had a valid complaint.

As to the second, well, really?

Later, expounding on his dream, he writes,

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.

To which one can only reply that so long as crime and other statistics show an unfortunate correlation between skin color and highly undesirable character content, judgment concerning the latter will not be entirely separated from the former.

Magnificent speech, of course.