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. This is an excerpt from an interview with senator Richard Russell of Georgia, whom NR billed in their headline to this piece as the “leader of the Souther opposition in the senate to the Administration’s civil rights bill”. It appeared on pages 105 and 106 of NR’s July 27, 1957, issue.
Question: In your recent senate speech you referred to the Civil Rights bill as “the most cunningly devised and contrived piece of legislation” that you had ever seen and compared it to laws passed by the Reconstruction Congress, which you said “put black heels on white necks.” Do the people of the south fear political domination by the Negro or miscegenation or both?
Russell: Both. As you know, Mr. Jones, there are some communities and some states where the Negro voting potential is very great. We wish at all costs to avoid a repetition of the Reconstruction period when newly-free slaves made the laws and undertook their enforecement. We feel even more strongly about miscegenation or racial amalgamation.
The experience of other countries and civilisations has demonstrated that the separation of the races biologically is highly preferable to amalgamation.
I know of nothing in human history that would lead us to conclude that miscegenation is desirable.
The interviewer followed up with this question:
Do you believe that school integration would be a step toward mass miscegenation in the South?
To which Russell replied:
Yes, a long insidious step toward it.
But that is not all. As you know, Mr. Jones, the public schools of the nation’s capital have had some sad experiences since integration was forced upon the people of the District of Columbia. Scholastic achievement has declined sharply, juvenile delinquency has increased enormously and the authorities have found it necessary to abandon practically all of the social activities which were a normal collateral aspect of school life, in both white and Negro schools prior to desegregation.
And while I can’t quote the entire interview, here’s another gem I have to share. In answer to a question as to whether the civil rights bill up for consideration in the senate represented a further trespass on the civil rights of white citizens, Russell replied about how
… despite the hardships and the sacrifices, the state issued bonds to provide separate systems in the public schools. They have been equal and in many instances today the Negro schools are more modern and better equipped than the white schools.
Wow! If Russell were still alive today he could probably get a great job in the Trump administration, especially if Sean Spicer or KellyAnne Conway needed replacing. Creating alternate facts is hard work, and not everyone can do it as imaginatively and as effortlessly as Russell appeared to be able to.
If you have access to a library with bound volumes or microfilm of the early issues of National Review I encourage you to read the entire interview. This is yet another fascinating item from their early years which, as far as I know, has never been reprinted. But it certainly should be.