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Desmond Whitfield holds a poster as he prepares to walk in New Orleans' Martin Luther King Jr. Day annual parade Monday, January 17, 2011.

(ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE)

If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive to day, he probably wouldn't recognize himself. I mean, if King were to hear all the things today that he would supposedly support, he'd probably sit up to set the record straight. In a column posted Friday about the Supreme Court's ruling on a Michigan affirmative action case, some readers were dead certain at where King would come down on the debate. And to make the point, they took a line from what I would bet is the only King speech they're familiar with, the speech he gave on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the August 1963 March on Washington.

You can probably guess the line. "I have a dream that one day 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." Well, that settles it, doesn't it? That must tell us everything King thought about affirmative action.

No, it doesn't.

The next year in his book Why We Can't Wait, King wrote: "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."

Stepen Oates, the author of a biography of King called Let The Trumpet Sound, quotes him thus: "A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro."

In 1965 the writer Alex Haley interviewed King for an interview that ran in Playboy Magazine. Haley asks him about an employment program to help "20,000,000 Negroes." After expressing his approval for it, King estimates that such a program would cost $50 billion.

Haley then asks: "Do you feel it's fair to request a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group?"

King: "I do indeed. Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages--potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America's wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest. In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro; it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races."

Haley asks him about possible resentment from white people, and he says that the poor white man ought to be "made to realize that he is in the very same boat with the Negro....Together, they could form a grand alliance."

Well, that never happened.

You can find Why We Can't Wait or Let The Trumpet Sound at your local library or bookstore. On the Internet you can find most everything King said at Stanford University's Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.

His conversation with Haley can be found at this link.

My bigger point here is: Don't guess what King would think about our issues. He left a wide paper trail.

Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@nola.com. Follow him at twitter.com/jarvisdeberry.