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.
On January 12, 1957, National Review published a surprisingly reasonable small item regarding the struggle for civil rights:
However paradoxical it may sound, it is so that Northern ideologists are responsible for the outbreak of violence in the south at that, nevertheless, no one is responsible for the violence save those who commit it. Southerners gulty of shooting stray bullets into buses filled with Negroes in Montgomery, Alabama, of flogging a bandleader in Camden, South Carolina, of burning down the house of a Negro minister in Tallahassee, Florida, can rail against politicization of the Supreme Court, against the perversion of the Constitution, against the abstractions of radical anthropologists, and every word of it may be true; but nothing that they say can atone for, or in any way mitigate, their debasing brutality.
Yes, they managed to include an obligatory bit blaming northern ideologists for the troubles in the south; but the gist of the piece is a clear condemnation of those southerners who were using violence in their efforts to preserve segregation.
Two weeks later, however, in the January 26 issue, they published this letter:
This has to do with an item in the January 12 National Review.
Has it been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the “Northern ideologues” who “are responsible for the outbreak of violence in the south” are not also the ones who are “guilty of shooting stray bullets into buses filled with Negroes… of flogging a band leader… and of burning down the house of a Negro minister…”? Can you be absolutely sure that Southerners committed this “debasing brutality”?
Saboteurs and agitators trained by “Northern ideologues” have, in the past, been known to increase tension by penetrating such outrages, especially when good Americand will probably be blamed for them in the public press.
Oh, well. For some reason they thought that letter was worth printing, but at least they didn’t call the author of that letter one of their “voices of sanity”.