First, Let's look at the full quote from yesterday, which came in response to a specific question (link):
"I would, and I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became a real in peoples lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished."
I think Josh Marshall, at the link above, misses the point. But he comes closer than a lot of people did yesterday. I think her point is that in order for meaningful change to come about, you have to get some legislation passed. I don't think she meant to say that Dr. King was all talk and no action. I think she just meant to make that one above point.
Here is why:
Hillary was very moved by Dr. King. When he was assassinated she was devestated. (link)
When Dr. King was killed on the balcony of a Memphis motel on April 4, 1968, Ms. Rodham was devastated. "I can’t take it anymore," she screamed after learning the news, her friends recalled. Crying, Ms. Rodham stormed into her dormitory room and hurled her book bag against the wall. Later, she made a telephone call to a close friend, Karen Williamson, the head of the black student organization on campus, to offer sympathy.
Hillary, who met Dr. King in 1962, "admired his methodical approach to social change, favoring it over what she considered the excessively combative methods of groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee." She has always had a preference for trying to work within the system. During the '60s, there was plenty of violent protest. Hillary thought that Dr. King's non-violent approach was superior to that.
In response to Dr. King’s assassination, there were riots in cities and unrest on campuses. Hillary helped organize some non-violent protest: a two-day strike. She also worked to promote achievable change — such as recruiting more black students than the 6 who were there at the time and hiring the school's first black professors.
People that knew Hillary at the time said after Dr. King's assassination, there was a change in Hillary's outlook, that she was "less restrained and less deferential after Dr. King’s death." Even so, even though she agreed with his assessment of anti-poverty programs, she still rejected the radical approach of Saul Alinsky, the antipoverty crusader and community activist, whom she wrote a paper about later that same year. Unlike Dr. King, whose approach she liked, she thought Alinsky's approach "ran counter to the notion of change within the system.":
Ms. Rodham endorsed Mr. Alinsky’s central critique of government antipoverty programs — that they tended to be too top-down and removed from the wishes of individuals.
But the student leader split with Mr. Alinsky over a central point. He vowed to "rub raw the sores of discontent" and compel action through agitation. This, she believed, ran counter to the notion of change within the system.
If the story had ended there, it would be worth writing about but hardly would qualify as a rousing endorsement of the causes Dr. King championed. But the story would not end there. After Hillary went to Yale Law School, she teamed up with a black woman from Mississippi named Marian Wright Edelman to work on child welfare issues, both anti-poverty and otherwise. In her own way, Hillary was responding to Dr. King's messages of racial harmony and protecting the downtrodden.
I wrote about some of this here, but my effort did not catch the essence of her early efforts nearly as well as the personal story here:
My son was born nearly 5 years ago and by the time he was 8 weeks old, our pediatrician realized he wasn't developing at the "normal" rate. She referred us to the genetics clinic at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where they tested him for every syndrome under the sun over the next few years. His low muscle tone, delays in hitting the regular milestones such as sitting up, walking, talking, and all that other stuff prompted us to sign him up with the Infants & Toddlers program in our county. We were lucky – our son was able to get home-visits from physical therapists, speech therapists and a special ed teacher by the time he was 18 months old, and they worked with him until he turned three. After his third birthday, we signed him up with the PEP program at a local school, where he continued to work with dedicated teachers & therapists. My sweet boy is in his third year of preschool and is making REMARKABLE progress – we have no doubt that this early intervention will make all the difference in his young life to the point where he'll catch up to his peers in school.
Early in her career, Hillary spearheaded a project for the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) in New Bedford, MA to reconcile the discrepancies between the number of school-aged children and school enrollment figures. She went through a school district and knocked on doors until she got her answers. She found that children with special needs – those with physical disabilities like blindness, developmental delays (like my son's) and those in wheelchairs – were being denied schooling. She submitted the results of the survey to Congress and two years later, at the urging of the CDF, Congress the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which mandated that all children with physical, emotional and learning disabilities be educated in the public school system.
Throughout her career, Hillary has worked to promote the rights of women and children, specifically issues raised by the Children's Defense Fund. Though she and Mrs. Edelman, the founder of CDF, disagreed about the welfare reform in the 1990s, there is no denying that Hillary's influence led to the passage of legislation promoting causes championed by CDF. It is also hard to deny that many of these changes directly helped those who might have been adversely affected by the Clinton welfare reform. These include an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provided more support to working parents; Other legislation enacted during this time period included the Childhood Hunger Prevention Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act; Funding was also increased for the Head Start program and for child immunization; There was stepped up enforcement of child support payments with the help of the Internal Revenue Service.(link, link)
There is no doubt that Hillary could have been a well-paid lawyer with a six or even seven figure yearly income. She chose to work on child poverty issues. After working on the impeachment of President Nixon, she left a promising career on the east coast and came to Arkansas to marry Bill. After coming to Arkansas she continued to work on the issues she had become passionate about, in addition to working on legal aid and speedy trial issues in the early Arkansas years.
Although she has not focused on Civil Rights the way Dr. King did, civil rights was not the sum total of Dr. King's message. Hillary has worked to promote the rights of women, including breaking the glass ceiling, and children throughout her career. I think it is hard to deny she was influenced by him. It is certainly undeniable that she respected him and was devestated by his assassination. She would never think of him as someone who promised change and didn't deliver, which is what her opponents accused her of saying.