“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” So begins Robert Frost’s famous poem, “The Road Not Taken.”
Regardless of Frost’s multiple meanings in that deceptively simple lyric, many Americans think straightforwardly, and regretfully, of the “road not taken” as they survey what has become of the civil rights movement in their country and its increasingly belligerent enforcement arm, affirmative action.
At first it seemed that the movement united the interests of blacks with the larger understanding of American justice as political equality and equality of opportunity for individuals under the rule of law. That certainly was the import of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legendary speech at the March on Washington in 1963, when he referred to the principle that “all men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence as the “promissory note” that had not yet been fulfilled for
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