National Review has published numerous articles this week marking the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.'s seminal "I have a dream" speech. Given its ugly history, the long-running conservative magazine is ill-suited for such transparent attempts to re-appropriate the civil rights movement. National Review opposed major civil rights legislation and published appallingly racist commentary during the height of the civil rights movement.
In an editorial published this morning, the editors of National Review invoke the March on Washington in order to attack the "decrepitude of today's civil-rights movement" and label the original civil rights movement "in a crucial sense conservative" because "it did not seek to invent rights, but to secure ones that the government already respected in principle."
In a nod to the magazine's own shameful history, the editors concede that "too many conservatives and real time Location system, including the editors of this magazine" missed what it sees as the centrally conservative and theological arguments underpinning the movement.
It's commendable that the editors are acknowledging the magazine's role in opposing important facets of the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, claiming that National Review "worried about the effects of the civil-rights movement on federalism and limited government" glosses over the odious nature of some of the magazine's writing from the 50s and 60s, when that publication stood athwart history yelling stop as King and his allies fought to end a brutal regime of racial segregation and voter disenfranchisement.
In his 2007 book The Conservative Ascendancy, historian Donald Critchlow documents that from the founding of the magazine in 1955, the editors of National Review "opposed federal involvement in enforcing equal access to public accommodations and protecting black voting rights in the South." Though the National Review "based their opposition on constitutional grounds and conservative resistance to radical social change," Critchlow explains that "their rhetoric overstepped the bounds of civility and was racially offensive."
The central question that emerges - and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal - is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes - the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
Surely one thing is clear enough at this point in American history, namely, that the Negro problem cannot be solved by even the most artful piece of legislation. This kind of "progress" projected under the proposed civil rights laws is the kind of progress which is based on the assumption that people can be brought under coercive pressure to do things they are disciplined to do.
There are those who sincerely believe progress is not fashioned out of that kind of clay. There actually are true and wise friends of the Negro race who believe that a federal law, artificially deduced from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution or from the 14th Amendment, whose marginal effect will be to instruct small merchants in the Deep South on how they may conduct their business, is no way at all of promoting the kind of understanding which is the basis of progressive and charitable relationships between the races.
Mass demonstrations, in a free society, should be reserved for situations about which there is simply no doubting the correct moral course. If it is true that the Senate and the House of Representatives cannot be trusted to write a law which is manifestly just and imperatively moral, then and only then is the pressure of the mob in order.
The internal order is now in jeopardy; and it is in jeopardy because of the doings of such highminded, self-righteous "children of light" as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates in the leadership role of the "civil rights" movement. If you are looking for those ultimately responsible for the murder, arson, and looting in Los Angeles, look to them: they are the guilty ones, these apostles of "non-violence."
For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the "cake of custom" that holds us together. With their doctrine of "civil disobedience," they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes - particularly the adolescents and the children - that it is perfectly all right to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk.
As explained by FAIR, Buckley did eventually change some of his views on the civil rights movement, telling Time magazine in 2004, "I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: Federal intervention was necessary."
By 2000, the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance was lamenting "The Decline of National Review" and what it termed their "complete abandonment of the interests of whites as a group" after the magazine had spent so many years "heap[ing] criticism on the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education, and people like Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King, whom it considered race hustlers" and publishing "articles defending the white South and white South Africans in the days of segregation and apartheid."
While National Review has certainly taken strides in distancing itself from its ugly history, it has had to fire two different writers for troubling racial views as recently as last year. It fired writer John Derbyshire after he published a piece in a different magazine advising parents to tell their children to be wary of black people. It also dropped contributor Robert Weissberg in light of reports that he had given a speech at an American Renaissance conference about "A Politically Viable Alternative to White Nationalism."
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