Now This: New Oval Office Rug Wrongly Attributes MLK’s Quote?

File this under things that would likely not have been an issue before the Internet. While President Obama was on vacation the Oval Office got a (very beige) makeover. The major contribution to the new look is a new oval rug featuring famous quotes from past presidents and one from Martin Luther King.

The quote from MLK will likely be familiar to you and reads: ““The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Towards Justice.” Except King is not the originator of the phrase, someone named Theodore Parker is. Parker is, according to WaPo, “an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.”

A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.

Yet somehow a mistake was made and magnified in our culture to the point that a New England antebellum abolitionist’s words have been enshrined in the Oval Office while attributed to a major 20th-century figure….Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

Presumably the rug will stay, (as a commenter points out the wording is not identical) but look forward to at least part of the next press briefing being devoted to questioning how the mistake was made. Meanwhile, enjoy Mo Rocca‘s tour of the new Oval below.