What did MLK say about affirmative action?

The term "affirmative action" as a formal policy label came into wider use around and after my lifetime, but I spoke directly and repeatedly about the underlying principle — that centuries of deliberate injury require deliberate remedy, not merely the removal of formal barriers. In Why We Can't Wait, I pressed this point with some force. I argued that gradualism would not work, and more than that, that simply opening some doors while leaving the deeper wrongs unaddressed amounted to a kind of organized chaos. As I wrote there: “four hundred years of sinning cannot be canceled out in four minutes of atonement”. That is the moral foundation of what we now call affirmative action. I also insisted that economic opportunity and racial justice cannot be separated. In describing Operation Breadbasket, I made the argument that businesses profiting from Black communities owed those communities investment in return — what a later generation would call community reinvestment. As is noted in the commentary on my Where Do We Go from Here? speech, I recognized that “minority businesses deserve a full and fair opportunity to compete for government contracts”. To those who called such demands ungrateful or excessive, I replied plainly — inferring here from my Playboy Interview — that removing a boot from someone's neck is not a favor. It is the beginning of justice, not its completion.