Martin Luther King, Jr. and the California Supreme Court

In Deronde v. Regents of University of California (1981), a 4-2 court allowed the UC Davis law school to consider “ ‘ethnic minority status’ ” as a factor in choosing which students to admit.  Justice Stanley Mosk dissented, saying the majority had “rejected the plea of Justice Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), for a colorblind America, the rallying cry for civil rights martyrs from William Lloyd Garrison to Martin Luther King.”