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 issues such as integration and racial equality.
National Review began publication in 1956. From the beginning one of their major issues was opposition to the civil rights movement and criticism of its leaders and supporters.
Here’s an excerpt from a book review article by Richard Weaver which appeared in the July 13, 1957, issue and which touches on a number of NR’s favorite themes. It starts with a dig at the Brown v. Board of Education decision (a familiar target in NR articles) but really gets interesting when it gets to South Africa and apartheid:
The Supreme Court’s extraordinary dictate to the public schools promises to keep race relations inflamed for an indefinite period. It is therefore to be expected that there will be a continuing spate of books from “liberal” sources, filled with self-righteousness and preaching the funeral of what is pejoratively called “discrimination”. At hand are three which suggest the range of treatment: The Negro and Southern Politics, by Hugh D. Price; Go South to Sorrow, by Carl T. Rowan; and Passive Resistance in South Africa by Leo Kuper.
Mr. Price’s book was originally a thesis. Dealing in the statistics and “trends” of social science, it surveys the role of the Negro in recent Florida politics and, with an occasional jab at conservatism, concludes that he is there to stay. Go South to Sorrow is low-grade political journalism. Declamatory, shrill, and containing wild misstatements (e.g., “No child in South Carolina gets the kind of schooling given to youngsters in Michigan ” and “Everyone in Alabama is poorer than everyone in Pennsylvania ”), it is a sorry specimen of Negro intellectual leadership. Mr. Kuper’s book centers on the apartheid movement in South Africa and, at the expense of considerable jargon, comes to the conclusion that passive resistance is proving a useful political instrumentality.
If this were all, Mr. Kuper’s book might be the most innocuous of the three. But this is not all, for it is Mr. Kuper who, unwittingly or not, opens the real issue. In his discussion of race relations in South Africa, he notes that Communism is there being progressively redefined in racial terms. That is to say, Communism is coming to be identified in racial integration.
The blame for this he tries to shift to the apartheid laws themselves. But surely this is artless. The Communist attitude toward race stems from Communism’s positivistic representation of man, which has always had as one of its cardinal tenets the dogma that there are no read differences between people except economic differences. Remove the economic differences and all the others — racial, cultural, social and moral — disappear. Thus the collectivizing of the economy can be depended on to oblieterate the various differences that keep people from being “socialized”…
And with that, Weaver is off and running on one of National Review’s recurring themes — drawing a connection between those who favor racial equality and Communists.
A few paragraphs farther on, Weaver has returned to the US and the good folks of the south who are standing strong against integration:
The common people often perceive elemental things which the over-educated cannot see. That they have been right in identifying this as the opening tactic of Communism in this country now seems beyond question. We can observe in a number of areas how “racial collectivism” is being used as a crowbar to pry loose rights over private property. There was a time when ownership of property gave the owner the right to say to whom he would and would not sell and rent. But now, with the outlawing of restrictive covenants by the Supreme Court this right has been invaded, if not effectively taken away.
[What Weaver is mourning there is a Supreme Court decison striking down covenants in leases which said you could only buy or rent a piece of property in certain neighborhoods if you agreed in advance not to sell or rent it to a black person.]
Farther down there’s another great passage in which Weaver talks about how the various Supreme Court decisions striking down racist laws show:
… a steady and indeed now far advanced eroding of rights over private property following a Communist racial theory. In most of the process the Supreme Court has been the “running dog” of the Kremlin.
“Integration” and “Communization” are, after all, pretty closely synonymous. In the light of what is happening today, the first may be little more than a euphemism for the second. It does not take many steps to get from the “integrating” of the facilities to the “communizing” of the facilities, if the impulse is there.
If you have access to a library which has early issues of National Review in bound volumes or on microfilm, I encourage you to read the whole article. For some reason, National Review has (as far as I know) never reprinted it.
