When it comes to civil rights, many commentators relate what Buckley’s opinions were in the 1950s but fail to note his subsequent changes of heart and mind.
When it comes to civil rights, many commentators relate what Buckley’s opinions were in the 1950s but fail to note his subsequent changes of heart and mind.
S ince William F. Buckley Jr. passed from the scene, he has been the subject of three biographies (including mine), two published collections of his most notable essays, and a documentary and a play recounting his “distasteful encounter” with Gore Vidal. Last week, Buckley was featured in PBS’s American Masters Series.
In approaching a figure as multidimensional as Buckley, one must be selective. One would have to include publication of God and Man at Yale, his founding of National Review, Buckley’s early opposition to federal civil-rights legislation, his run for mayor of New York City, Firing Line, and his consequential friendship with Ronald Reagan.
Buckley was both an intellectual and an activist, who changed his mind on many topics as new facts came to light and circumstances changed. When it comes to civil rights, many commentators relate what Buckley’s opinions were in the 1950s but fail to inform readers and audiences of his subsequent changes of heart and mind. Yet civil rights was an issue upon which Buckley reflected continually.
The bad news first. Buckley’s editorials put National Review on record as favoring racial segregation and white supremacy. Born in 1925, Buckley spent time in Columbia, S. C., where his parents maintained a winter home. His mother, a New Orleans debutante, was the daughter of a cotton broker. His father, William F. Buckley Sr., though born poor, became a wealthy Texas oilman.
South Carolina governor (and future U.S. senator) Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on the “Dixiecrat ticket” in opposition to Truman’s advocacy of civil-rights legislation, was a friend of Buckley’s parents. In 1957, Thurmond set a record for the longest filibuster in Senate history in opposition to Eisenhower’s civil-rights bill. Hoping to attract support for Buckley’s fledgling magazine, his father wrote to Thurmond, to assure him that Buckley was “for segregation.”
Buckley’s most notorious editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail,” declared that whites were the “superior race” and fit to govern, even in locales where whites composed a minority of the population. African Americans would be given the vote by whites when the latter deemed them “ready.” The editorial condoned violence as a means of maintaining the status quo. As “massive resistance” campaigns, often peppered by violence, gained traction, Buckley moved away from this position.
Buckley’s editorial caused controversy, even within the magazine. NR colleague Brent Bozell condemned its casual acceptance of lawbreaking. Bozell was suspicious that whites who would deny blacks the right to vote did so because they presumed that African Americans would favor integration. He found it odd that Buckley called for a “strict constructionist” interpretation of the Constitution but ignored the spirit and letter of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Buckley replied that the “strict construction” principle did not apply in the instance, because southerners had been forced to accept these amendments as a condition for readmission of their states into the Union.
Buckley would revisit this issue after helping Senator Barry Goldwater secure the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. Even though Goldwater opposed segregation and helped to desegregate his own state of Arizona, he opposed the 1964 civil-rights bill on constitutional and libertarian grounds. His vote against it led to a surge in his popularity in the previously “solid” Democratic South.
Although the Buckleys had become wealthy, Buckley’s grandfather was a small farmer who had trouble making ends meet. Among the few white Catholics in Duval County, Texas, he ran for sheriff and won because of his support among Mexican Americans. Poor “white trash” (the family’s term) hoodlums associated with the corrupt Democratic machine dragooned 50 persons at gunpoint to vote against Buckley’s grandfather when he sought reelection. By the 1960s, Buckley would see in the faces of violent Southern mobs the same resentments, anger, and fears that drove his grandfather from office in an earlier era.
While he continued to oppose federal intervention to extend civil and voting rights to African Americans, Buckley began to express sympathy for the mobs’ intended victims. He advised Southern whites, when they protested, to do so peacefully. He continually warned them that by their actions, they were trying the patience of the rest of the country. Gone from his writings and speeches were references to the “southern cause,” whites’ being the “superior race,” and mention of segregationists as victims of liberals and “Yankee aggressors.”
First in private, and thereafter in public, Buckley began voicing doubts about positions he had espoused. His changes of heart coincided with a series of tumultuous events. They included:
• Violent mobs, egged on by Governor Ross Barnett, rioted in protest of a federal-court order requiring the University of Mississippi to enroll African-American Air Force veteran James Meredith, who had completed two years of study at Jackson State. They pelted law-enforcement personnel, federal agents, soldiers, and civilians with bottles, bricks, and bats. Two persons were killed.
• Angry white mobs attacked buses carrying “freedom riders,” who sought to help African Americans register to vote in Southern states.
• Governor George Wallace attempted to prevent two African Americans from entering the University of Alabama by blocking the main entrance with his person until President Kennedy “nationalized” the National Guard and backed it up with federal troops. Wallace stood aside.
• Birmingham public-safety commissioner “Bull Connor” turned fire hoses and dogs upon African-American teenage demonstrators. Televised coverage of the episode had a negative effect on U.S. prestige abroad.
• A bomb went off in a Birmingham church days after the conclusion of the “March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs,” killing four young girls.
These events profoundly affected Buckley. Early in 1963, he wrote an impassioned letter to his mother, from whom he derived his strong Catholic faith, inquiring how she could “reconcile Christian fraternity with the separation of the races.” Buckley consulted with several Catholic theologians on the same subject. The church bombing, in particular, outraged him. He accused Wallace of having triggered the attack through his “noisy (and violent) opposition” to integration. The governor, he said, had “galvanized” the “demon,” which turned out to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Buckley voiced respect for President John F. Kennedy, with whom he had disagreed on other matters, for referring to civil rights as a “moral issue” in his address to the nation in response to the violence in Alabama. Reflecting back on the era years later, Buckley wrote that Kennedy “got there sooner than (Buckley) had.”
In 1965, Buckley’s columns voiced sympathy for the voting-rights demonstrators, beaten by state police, at Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Mississippi could not “have it both ways,” he wrote: It could not preserve its right to set voting requirements, while using race as the single criterion of voter eligibility. He derided the tactics that local registrars used to prevent blacks from registering to vote.
Whatever suspicions he held about an increased federal role in state affairs, Buckley came out strongly in support of voting rights: “On the single issue of whether a Negro in Alabama should be deprived of the vote simply because of the color of his skin, it seems to me that there cannot be any argument: none moral, and certainly none constitutional.” As the voting-rights bill worked its way through Congress, National Review did not oppose it. After the Voting Rights Act had became law, it praised “the seriousness, hope, and quiet pride” on the faces of African Americans lining up to register. It prophesized that extending the vote to African Americans would transform the South.
When Buckley ran for mayor of New York City later in 1965, in what he termed a “paradigmatic campaign,” Buckley surprised supporters and critics alike when he announced that, because government had, over the centuries, caused much of the suffering African Americans had endured, he would provide them with “special treatment” when it came to social services, benefits, housing, education, and hiring. Buckley argued that because government had discriminated against African Americans, it had a special obligation to make amends.
During his campaign, Buckley drew so heavily upon the book Beyond the Melting Pot by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan that Moynihan accused him of plagiarism. Buckley responded that he had quoted Moynihan by name in every sentence he uttered about poverty and the state of the black family. After Moynihan became domestic-policy adviser to President Nixon, Buckley joined other journalists on a tour of depressed urban areas. He filled several columns with testimony that residents had given him about local corruption, shakedowns of black businesses, and selective harassment by the police.
Buckley came away from the experience enchanted by the charm, street smarts, and idealism he discerned among young activists. He was also surprised at how much they agreed with him on decentralization, insensitive public bureaucracies, and failed federal programs. He would subsequently showcase some of these ideas on Firing Line
In 1970, in an article in Look, Buckley speculated that an African American could be elected president in 1980. That event, he said, “would come as a welcome tonic” for the white soul and would kindle among African Americans the sense of pride and of belonging in a manner reminiscent of Catholics’ response to John F. Kennedy’s election. Anyone who put that piece beside the editorial Buckley had written 13 years earlier can be forgiven for doubting that they came from the hand of the same man.
“I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow,” he told Time in 1995. “I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.” He told Jeff Greenfield, an early Firing Line regular, that he lamented that conservatives had not forcefully advocated civil rights in the 1960s.
While Buckley and Martin Luther King Jr. disagreed on many things, Buckley was an early admirer of King. In contrast with Buckley’s early opposition to federal civil-rights legislation, he embraced the Montgomery bus boycott: “It is one thing to take the position that the government has not the power to compel integration; it is another to take the position that Negroes be compelled to support a legally constructed monopoly.” Though he never went “all in” on King’s civil-disobedience doctrine, Buckley was among the first to call for the creation of a national holiday in King’s honor as well as for a memorial to him on the National Mall.
Clearly, for Buckley’s full views on civil rights, as with many other issues, it is best to look at the man in full, not the man in part.