Poll: Most blacks say MLK's vision on race fulfilled

More than two-thirds of African-Americans believe Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision for race relations has been fulfilled, a CNN poll found -- a figure up sharply from a survey in early 2008.

The CNN-Opinion Research Corp. survey was released Monday, a federal holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader and a day before Barack Obama is to be sworn in as the first black U.S. president.

The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King's vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech -- roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.

But whites remain less optimistic, the survey found.

"Whites don't feel the same way -- a majority of them say that the country has not yet fulfilled King's vision," CNN polling director Keating Holland said. However, the number of whites saying the dream has been fulfilled has also gone up since March, from 35 percent to 46 percent.

In the 1963 speech, delivered to a civil rights rally on the Mall in Washington, King said: "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." 

"Has that dream been fulfilled? With the election of Barack Obama, two thirds of African-Americans believe it has," CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider said.

"Most blacks and whites went to bed on election night saying, 'I never thought I'd live to see the day.' That's what the nation is celebrating on this King holiday: We have lived to see the day," Schneider said. 

You can say many negative things about Obama. And believe me, you will read most of them on this site. And perhaps you have to be a certain age to really, really appreciate how truly remarkable the journey has been.

From Jim Crow water fountains to electing a black man to the presidency is as profound a change as going from the horse and buggy to the space shuttle in a lifetime. Martin Luther King had many faults but his vision of a color blind America was not one of them. It is not his fault that the inheritors of that dream twisted his vision into the unrecognizable thing that "affirmative action," minority set asides, goal oriented college admissions, and equal opportunity has come to mean today.

I suspect King, if he had lived, would have resisted such race-based policies. He had much different ideas of what "affirmative action" was supposed to be as well as ideas on "economic justice" that were firmly grounded in the American system.

People may think King's vision has been realized. But I doubt whether King himself would be happy with the results.