To commemorate Black History Month, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit a few items from National Review, a prominent conservative journal some of you may have heard of or be familiar with, regarding the issues such as integration and racial equality.
National Review began publication in 1956. Here’s one of their early articles about integration, from page 7 of the April 4, 1958 issue:
Voices of SanityTwo men, both distinguished in their fields, have registered their opinion that involved in the controversy over the Supreme Court decision is not simply whether one believes in segregation. William Falkner, Nobel Prize novelist, wrote in the Reporter that he is against segregated schooling; but he is convinced that the issue is political, not racial, and involves inalienable rights of the member-states. So he declares himself one with those who intend to resist the order of the court. (If necessary, he said, he would “fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes” — a piece of melodrama of the kind one might expect from the author of The Tall Men.
[the article then spends a paragraph talking about a Princeton professor, Alpheus Mason, who criticized the Brown v Board of education decision.]
Mr. Faulkner and Mr. Mason, in that they agree the issue is subtle, help bring it into proper focus. Those who refuse to pitch the question except in polar moral terms, will write of Mr. Faulkner as an eccentric, and Mr. Mason as an irrelevant sorehead exasperated because his own reasoning, rather than that of Gunnar Myrdal, was [not] relied upon by the court. Whatever the attempt to dismiss them, their voices count: for theirs, in respect of their dogged insistence that other things than Jim Crow are at stake, are the voices of sanity.
Voices of sanity, from a 1956 conservative perspective.
And 61 years later, many on the right unfortunately still have a very poor understanding of what is sane and what is insane.