re: #379 Stephen T.

From the Salon article:

National Review had come of age alongside the civil rights movement, having published its first issue a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed segregation in public schools and two weeks before the arrest of Rosa Parks. From the beginning, National Review could have endorsed the traditionalist notion that changes should come slowly within a society but should happen nonetheless, and that the rule of law need be respected above all else. Or it could have taken a libertarian stance that the state shouldn’t be in the business of segregating people at all.

But it didn’t take either of these paths. Instead, it fomented a direct assault against civil rights, embracing nearly all of the most offensive and discredited arguments against the movement, including the idea that black people were inherently inferior to white people. It routinely dressed up the racist resistance to civil rights with respectable-sounding arguments about states’ rights and constitutional law. As a signal crafter of conservative talking points in the midcentury years, throughout the 1950s and 1960s National Review developed arguments to oppose every motion in favor of civil rights, indiscriminately using sometimes contradictory ideas in order to pursue a single goal: the continued subjugation of America’s black people.