Distortion of History

All last week President Reagan draped himself in the mantle of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He visited with youngsters at a southeast Washington school named after the slain civil-rights leader. He counseled with King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. And he touted the progress that he says blacks have made under his Administration.

In the charitable spirit of the man honored on the newest federal holiday, it is well to remember that King’s vision of a world in which little children needed fear no prejudice is broad enough, his revulsion at injustice deep enough, to accommodate all who would take up the banner.

But to turn King’s own words to uses that would subvert his goal of a truly open society, as the President has now done, is too much. On Saturday Reagan gave his regular radio talk. In it he said that his Administration was not trying to do away with affirmative action, which is one tool that Presidents since Lyndon B. Johnson have supported to try to open job opportunities for minorities and women. The Reagan Administration is in fact trying to weaken a presidential executive order under which people seeking federal contracts must operate. The order specifies that the contractors must set goals aimed at increasing the number of minorities and women whom they hire and promote. The evisceration of that order was still under consideration even as the President spoke.

Reagan used some nice words. “We are committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society. A society, that in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

In the first place, the order that Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese III, is working so hard to overturn does not require quotas. Indeed, Labor Department studies published during the Reagan Administration have demonstrated that goals and timetables have not led to quotas. In the second place, this is not yet a colorblind society. The inability of this nation to reach that goal is one of its most shameful failures. That is a fact--not merely an argument thrown up by civil-rights leaders who want to keep their jobs, as some of their opponents have charged.

No one knows what Martin Luther King Jr. would say or do in today’s climate of indifference toward the rights of all people to seek education, jobs and human dignity. No one should presume to speak for a man so long gone. No one, especially not a leader presuming to serve all the people, should seek to corrupt another man’s words for his own political ends.