"We offer the following on the crisis in the Senate and the South: In the Deep South the Negroes are, by comparison with the Whites, retarded"
This comes from the National Review back in 1960. Here is an excerpt of a National Review article the week before MLK's historic march on Washington . . .
And precisely the question to ask now is whether the current controversy over the Negro question is one that clearly calls for direct mobilization.
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.
But mob-deployment in circumstances that call for thought and discussion and mediation is a dangerous resort.
Mobs. That piece of filth was written by William Buckley himself.
MediaMatters.org has a great compilation of these and other old National Review articles that discussed what they referred to as the Negro Problem.
So let this be a reminder, as the National Review tries to praise a sanitized MLK who never mentioned wages or labor rights please remember this little memento from the past, as conservatives paint a sterilized picture of MLK who only wanted racism to go away and never mentioned labor unions, poverty, the need for better jobs and higher wages, as the GOP destroys everything that Martin Luther King Jr stood for let's remind ourselves that the leading conservative publications of the 60's thought it was totally fine to say that black people are retarded when compared to white people. Oh, but things have changed, racism isn't the same, now the National Review treats MLK like he is a sanitized corporate logo about putting racism behind us with none of the icky economics stuff while throwing up barriers to the ballot box across the Republican South.
More below the fold . . .
The same arguments against used against civil rights then are still used today on every issue the modern GOP opposes. That we should do nothing. It isn't Congress's job. That is isn't that big of a problem anyway. That even if we tried to do something it wouldn't make that much of a difference.
America has changed, but the GOP's Southern Strategy has not. The conservative media has become totally unhinged since President Obama's re-election. I have never heard white people openly mouthing off about black people like this in my lifetime. At the National Review of today a post is up about how MLK was actually a conservative. File that under; Stupid Shit White Conservative Love to Tell Themselves.
For that matter, file everything else the GOP says under that file too. The mental backflips and doublethink involved with thinking MLK was a conservative but 98% of modern African Americans are not defies logic. Oh, MLK was a conservative, it's just black people don't know about it.
And that's because it is not true.
. . . Today Al Sharpton, whose chief political success has been to foment enough racial hatred to yield arson and murder, can present himself as a civil-rights leader . . .
NationalReview.com
That's from the SAME
National Review article praising MLK today! In one paragraph MLK is a conservative hero, in the next Al Sharpton is inspiring murder and fire-bombings and racial hatred. Is there any doubt that if MLK were alive today they'd be calling him a race-hustler on Fox News night after night?
What is it about Al Sharpton that makes conservatives lose their minds? The National Review can't even praise MLK without bashing another black guy a few sentences later?
Republicans are wholly committed to destroying everything MLK fought for. Workers rights, voting rights, better jobs, a higher minimum wage, you can't be against those things and for MLK's dream. Talking about MLK without mentioning his commitment to workers rights is like talking about Ghandi without mentioning the British. Republican have invented a whole separate black history for white people for who hate everything MLK stood for.
But things have changed. Except for Conservatives, they are still pretty much the same pissed off rural and southern white guys who read the National Review. The only thing that has changed for Conservatives is that they are smart enough not to openly say black people are a slow witted lazy drag on the rest of us, now they just say that 47% of us are lazy moochers who want hand outs, and you can guess which 47% they mean.
Things change. And conservative hate that. But the National Review hasn't really changed that much. In 50 years they went from openly calling black people retards to claiming that a black man is inspiring arson and murder in an article meant to praise Martin Luther King Jr. I guess that is kind of an improvement.
And also proof that we all still have much further to go.
I leave the floor to you.