Editorial: LBJ speech has lesson for Bush

Monday, Jan. 20, 2003 | 8:43 a.m.

It is appropriate on this national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. to reflect on the origins of affirmative action, a program that has come under fire from President Bush as discriminatory. The president has aligned himself with lawsuits filed in 1997 by three white applicants to the University of Michigan and its law school. They claimed that they were denied admission while minority students with lesser academic achievements were admitted. The lawsuits have now reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to rule this spring.

In 1961 President John Kennedy ordered that federal agencies and federal contractors take "affirmative action" to ensure that hiring and employment policies were adopted without regard to anyone's "race, creed, color or national origin." Kennedy's order was issued about five years after King had taken the lead in raising the national consciousness about the extent of discrimination being suffered by black Americans. The term "affirmative action" stuck and its meaning evolved. We wish President Bush had taken to heart the words of another president from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, before launching his attack on affirmative action.

Speaking to the 1965 graduating class at Howard University, Johnson said, "You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You're free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." It was this perfectly sensible logic that led to formal affirmative action programs under President Richard Nixon and all future presidents. Because the programs include race as just one of many factors when hiring employees or admitting students, we do not see them as discriminating against white applicants. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1978, University of California versus Bakke, didn't either. It correctly rejected formal quotas but upheld the practice of using race as one of many qualifications for college admission.

Now President Bush wants to weaken affirmative action by having the Supreme Court rule against the University of Michigan's admissions program, which is virtually identical to programs used by universities all over the country. A lot of what King yearned for in his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech has been realized. And a lot hasn't. Any weakening of affirmative action would be a major setback.