The Open Question

This magazine has expressed views on the racial question that I consider dead wrong, and capable of doing grave hurt to the promotion of conservative causes. The editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail,” in the August 24 issue, contended that since the “cultural superiority” of the White over the Negro race is “a fact,” the White community in the South may therefore “take whatever measures are necessary”—concretely, restriction of the Negro franchise—”to make certain that it has its way…. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

Granting that the problem for the South is one of weighing one set of claims against another, has national review fairly defined the respective claims? On one side, the evidence is far from conclusive that Southern civilization hangs on the thread of Negro disfranchisement, or even that White Southerners believe it does. Are we not assured that Negroes, equally with Whites, endorse the principle of racial segregation? And by the same people, for the most part, who cite Negro voting as a threat to the segregation system? It is understandable that White Southerners should try to have it both ways—they can’t know what would happen should Negroes begin to vote, and they naturally want to cover their bet. But by the same token, the South is still somewhere this side of Armageddon: the White community is not asserting the right to save itself, but the right to fend off circumstances under which its survival might be challenged.

LB

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L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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This magazine has expressed views on the racial question that I consider dead wrong, and capable of doing grave hurt to the promotion of conservative causes. The editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail,” in the August 24 issue, contended that since the “cultural superiority” of the White over the Negro race is “a fact,” the White community in the South may therefore “take whatever measures are necessary”—concretely, restriction of the Negro franchise—”to make certain that it has its way…. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

Granting that the problem for the South is one of weighing one set of claims against another, has national review fairly defined the respective claims? On one side, the evidence is far from conclusive that Southern civilization hangs on the thread of Negro disfranchisement, or even that White Southerners believe it does. Are we not assured that Negroes, equally with Whites, endorse the principle of racial segregation? And by the same people, for the most part, who cite Negro voting as a threat to the segregation system? It is understandable that White Southerners should try to have it both ways—they can’t know what would happen should Negroes begin to vote, and they naturally want to cover their bet. But by the same token, the South is still somewhere this side of Armageddon: the White community is not asserting the right to save itself, but the right to fend off circumstances under which its survival might be challenged.