Report: Rugmaker Called to Carpet for Oval Office Flub

While President Obama vacationed in Martha's Vineyard, the Oval Office got a makeover, but one quote on the new carpet is wrongly attributed.

The new rug with the presidential seal is rimmed with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ok, well not totally King.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," reads the quote attributed to King. But it actually belongs to Theodore Parker, a Boston progressive from the 1800s whom King cited in his speeches, The Washington Post reports.

Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker, died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. His work was appreciated a century later by King, a leader of the civil rights movement that Parker embraced.

According to the Post, the rugmaker, The Scott Group of Grand Rapids, Mich., isn't totally at fault. Even Obama biographer David Remnick cited the quote as one of Obama's favorites without sourcing it.

The newspaper reported that Parker's complete quote in1853 read: "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."

Click here to read more from The Washington Post.