Young Horne with the Man

Horne warming up for the Rachmaninov second piano concerto, from America's Own Espresso Pundit, who notes that "Rach II was Ayn Rand's favorite piece.  So it's a cult favorite among Conservatives..."

Did Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne really attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as a fresh graduate of Mamaroneck High School, on August 28, 1963? He certainly enjoys saying he did:

I grew up in the civil rights era. In the summer of 1963, having just graduated from high school, I participated in the march on Washington, in which Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, that his son should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. I have held onto this ideal in the face of subsequent fads: political correctness, identity politics, racial preferences, and "ethnic studies." (Letter to the editor, Arizona Republic, 2/3/2007)

Or then,

In the summer of 1963, having recently graduated from high school, I participated in the civil rights march on Washington, in which Martin Luther King stated that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That has been a fundamental principal [sic] for me my entire life, and Ethnic Studies teaches the opposite. (Open Letter to the Citizens of Tucson, 6/11/2007).

In the summer of 1963, having recently graduated from high school, I participated in the civil rights march on Washington in which Martin Luther King stated that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That has been a fundamental principle for me my entire life, and Ethnic Studies teaches the opposite. (Guest Opinion [with the evident benefit of a little editing] in the Arizona Daily Star, 12/5/2007)

You know what? I was on that march on Washington in 19 -- summer of 1963 -- I had just graduated from high school -- where Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, saying, we should be judged by the quality of our character, and not the color of our skin. (Interview with Anderson Cooper, 5/12/2010)

And that has been my most fundamental belief my entire life, that we are individuals. The summer of 1963, I just graduated from high school. And I participated in the march on Washington in which Martin Luther King gave his famous speech where he said people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. It's been one of my most fundamental beliefs my entire life. (Interview with José Cardenas, Horizonte Video, 5/13/2010)

This is among my most deeply held beliefs that we are to be treated as individuals and not on the basis of race. In the summer of 1963, when I just graduated from high school, I participated in the march on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his famous speech where he said people should be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. (Interview with Alison Keyes, NPR, 5/13/2010)

No. In the summer of 1963, when I just graduated from high school, I went on the march on Washington, in which Martin Luther King gave his famous speech in which he said we should be judged by the quality of our character, rather than the color of our skin. And that has been among my deepest beliefs my entire life. And so this has made me opposed to dividing students by race. (Interview with Greta van Susteren, Fox News, 5/13/2010)

Comment attached to the official publication of Ballot Initiative 107, October 2010 (and no, they didn't proofread the text there either, at least not successfully). The PDF is from the web site of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, a pro-amendment organization that reprinted all the "vote yes" comments at a "What People are Saying" page. They were notarized, presumably, because they are the copies submitted to the state government.

Watch for it at around 1:44 to 2:14. Debate with Richard Martinez at the University of Arizona Law School, 3/22/2011

Asked whether he felt he was being likened to Bull Connor, the Alabama police commissioner who became a symbol of bigotry in the 1960s, Mr. Horne described how he had participated in the March on Washington in 1963 as a young high school graduate. (New York Times, 1/8/2011)

Interesting how consistently and tirelessly he says it the same way, eh? And always with reference to the one line, from a speech that after all contained a lot of ideas? (The one line conservatives always cite, to prove that Dr. King was really a conservative.) And how he only mentions it in the one context, that of the effort to get rid of Ethnic Studies in the Arizona schools, as if that had been what Dr. King was actually dreaming of?

Horne is using this anecdote for a specific rhetorical purpose: To explain, basically, what is not racist about his crusade, he implies that it could not possibly be racist because in 1963, when he had just graduated from high school, etc. The existence of Mexican-American Studies in Tucson is morally incompatible with the idea of judging people by the content of their character, and if you want to know what one has to do with the other, the answer is that Horne can't be questioned because he personally received the Dream.

So that the argument is clearly nonsense, a big non sequitur, even if he was present at that March.

But was he? If so, why is it just the one thing, the content of your character, that impressed itself upon his youthful mind? Why doesn't he remember the bus ride down from Mamaroneck, the excitement, the singing, the presence of another Horne, Lena? Why doesn't he remember that

we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Why didn't he learn anything from the experience? Because he's making it up, is why, out of a little reading and a little wistfulness about being alive in 1963, just for this purpose, of proving that "I am not a racist." And he sticks to his story in the narrowest version possible, as one does when one is telling a lie, so as not to get caught out.

Because in point of fact Mr. Horne isn't always entirely truthful.

For example, between 1997 and 2000 he signed submitted annual reports for his law firm to the Arizona Corporation Commission stating that he had never been a partner in a business that had declared bankruptcy. And yet he had been the president of T.C. Horne and Company when it went bankrupt in 1970--and the SEC, claiming that he had "violated the record-keeping, anti-fraud, and broker-dealer net capital provisions of the federal securities laws and filed false financial reports with the commission", sanctioned him with a lifetime trading ban, which they don't hand out like candy. "I didn't think about it because it was 40 years ago," he said, but it was more like 27 years ago the first time he checked that box and signed that form.

Or the time he referred to the labor activist Dolores Huerta as "Cesar Chávez's former girlfriend" (she is the wife of Chávez's brother Richard).

Horne on Monday called the criticism of his comments "a contrived diversion." "What's important is that she addressed a mandatory assembly of high-school students and told them that Republicans hate Latinos," he said. "And that's an outrage."

(Huerta evidently really did make the remark attributed to her, in an assembly at the Tuscon High Magnet School. I can't imagine what would make her think such a thing.)

Or when Phoenix TV anchor Brahm Resnik asked him about Arizona's poor record of academic achievement during Horne's time as state school superintendent: "We're 40th or below on so many different measurements." To the contrary, Horne said, "We're not 40th on any measure of academic success." Except 41st in the nation for 8th-grade reading scores on the NAEP since 2002, 47th for 4th grade, and 46th for the number of high school graduates who go on to college in 2008-09 according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

A critic remarks,

Horne seeks legitimacy in every presentation by invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream that 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.” The Arizona attorney general conveniently ignores other parts of Dr. King’s speech, claiming that as a high school student he marched with the Dr. King in 1963. Given Horne’s propensity for exaggeration it is a wonder that no one has questioned his claim.... He has never produced any photographs or other documentation. (Rodolfo F. Acuña, blog post, 4/8/2011)

Unless you count that notarized affidavit above. Hey, if he didn't really go to the march do you suppose that's perjury?