JURIST Guest Columnist Rebecca Zietlow of the University of Toledo College of Law says that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a dreamer but a doer whose activism helped bring about the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s…

Senator Hillary Clinton has been criticized for her recent remark that Martin Luther King’s “dream” would not have been realized but for President Lyndon Johnson and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There is some truth to Senator Clinton’s comment. Dr. King would not have succeeded without help from powerful politicians like President Johnson.

But the problem with her statement is the paradigm that it presents — one of top-down change, discounting the efforts of the thousands of political activists (the majority of whom were African Americans) who fought and even risked their lives to achieve political successes like the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Dr. King was not just a dreamer, but also a shrewd political activist who, with other leaders, mobilized an effective and successful movement for change. More to the point, Senator Clinton’s remark mistakenly implies a disconnect between Dr. King’s dream and the actions of President Johnson and the members of Congress who enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The central purpose of Dr. King’s activism was to encourage legislative change: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, were essential goals for Dr. King and his allies. Moreover, these statutes would not have been enacted but for their activism.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a landmark piece of legislation that outlawed segregation in places of public accommodation, employment, and education, and provided effective measures for enforcing those mandates. Anti-segregationist members of Congress had been proposing civil rights legislation since the mid 1930s, but their attempts were stifled by segregationist members of Congress who held important leadership positions. After World War II, African American labor leaders and returning GIs who had fought racism and ethnic hatred abroad joined together with other African Americans who were tired of being treated like second class citizens to form a civil rights movement. One of the goals of the civil rights movement was ending race based segregation.

The civil rights movement gained momentum with the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott and the emergence of Dr. King as a charismatic and politically canny leader. Subsequent campaigns, including the boycotts of segregated lunch counters, the Freedom Riders, and the civil disobedience in Georgia and Alabama, heightened national awareness of segregation and garnered public support for federal civil rights legislation.

When Dr. King gave his memorable “I Have A Dream” speech at a rally in Washington in the summer of 1963, attended by over 100,000 people, he demanded federal legislation to end segregation.

Dr. King and other civil rights activists created a climate of change in which their call for legislative reform could not be ignored. Leaders of the civil rights movement and the labor movement also actively lobbied for the legislation and were involved in weekly strategy meetings with Senate leaders during the filibuster of that Act. Make no mistake: that Act was one of King’s finest achievements. King stood proudly by as Johnson signed the Act. Senator Clinton’s remark undervalues both the power of the dream and the concrete deeds of the dreamer.

Rebecca Zietlow is the Charles W. Fornoff Professor of Law and Values at the University of Toledo College of Law and the author of Enforcing Equality: Congress, the Constitution, and the Protection of Individual Rights (NYU Press 2006)
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