Fifty years ago this week, Dr. Martin Luther King stood before the statue of Abraham Lincoln and delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, a public address that took its place alongside the most eloquent and impassioned words ever written and spoken by any public figure in the nation's history.

On August 28, 1963, a hundred years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing millions of enslaved people, Dr. King said "the negro is still not free."

Now, 50 years later, Martin Luther King Jr. is an icon. There are streets named after him in dozens of American towns, many of them running through neighborhoods where black poverty is even more desperate than it was when he was leading the fight for equality. King was hated then, and the language of hatred used against him can still be heard, quite often by people who praise the martyred civil rights leader even as they mouth the kinds of racism they deny is in their hearts.

They insist they aren't racist, but...

The key word in that last sentence is the last one, because what always follows that "but" is where the racism is embedded. Back when Martin Luther King Jr. was being labeled a "communist" and an "agitator" by the same kinds of people now too often found at Tea Party gatherings, or in that demographic so often referred to as the Republican Party "base," it was common to hear racists saying things like "I'm not a racist, but I wouldn't want my sister to marry a Negro." Or, "I'm no racist, but I worked with Negroes once, and they were lazy." Or, I'm no racist, but I don't think that God meant for Negroes and whites to get married."

Fifty years ago, during the same summer Dr. King gave his historic speech in which he dreamed of a country that lived up to its creed, the California legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, a law that made it illegal for landlords, real estate agents, or home sellers to discriminate on the basis of race. The bill was drafted to push back against the practice of redlining, which was the systematic racism that kept black people from buying or renting property in all-white neighborhoods or suburbs.

The following year, the California Real Estate Association launched an initiative to have the Fair Housing Act overturned. Appealing to racism, that initiative was wildly successful, garnering far more than the necessary number of signatures required to put it on the ballot where it became known as Proposition 14. My wife and I worked long and hard to defeat Proposition 14, but when the votes were counted, more than 65 percent of California voters voted in favor of discrimination.

The John Birch Society, a right wing group akin to the modern day Tea Party, was the most active racist force in that campaign, followed closely by the California Republican Assembly, all of whom argued that they weren't racists at all, but were merely standing up for property rights. They weren't racists, but they wanted to protect homeowners from having undesirable neighbors, or from having property values decline when black folks moved in.

A few years later, the California Supreme Court struck down Prop. 14, declaring it an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

What followed was a huge reaction known as "white backlash," in which the popular Democratic Governor Pat Brown would lose his popularity, making way for the political rise of Ronald Reagan, who rode anti-black bigotry into a gubernatorial victory that would pave the way to his ascendancy to the White House.

Those victories were made possible, in part, by the wily Nixonian ploy to peel away white Southern racists from the Democratic Party and turn them into Republicans based on their fear of black people. Since the more overt racism of the '50s had shown its ugliness for the entire nation to see (Medgar Evers, for instance, was gunned down in Mississippi the same year Dr. King gave his "I have a dream" speech), it became socially unacceptable for racists to speak their racism plainly. Racism became a little more subtle, with Reagan and others like him speaking a code that talked about "welfare queens" and George Bush running the famous Willy Horton ad, tapping into white fear of black men.

Now racists can even find ready reasons to justify the killing of a skinny 17-year-old black kid like Trayvon Martin, all while saying they're "not racist, but people should have a right to protect themselves."

A half century after Dr. King's historic speech, the argument about racism has descended to these absurdly childish levels. Anyone who brings up the idea that race was a factor in the Zimmerman case is, ipso facto, a racist. Like kids in the sandbox, they counter any argument by saying "No I'm not; you are."

The year after Dr. King delivered that soaring speech, three civil rights workers-Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney-were brutally murdered in Mississippi, killed with the cooperation of law enforcement officials there, all of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Lots of people made excuses for those murderers who, they said, were merely protecting their way of life from outside agitators. They weren't racists, but ...

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