Barry Goldwater and the Brown decision

Kevin Williamson at National Review has a fine essay on the important role that Barry Goldwater played in desegregation in Arizona and in the United States.

First, Williamson reminds us of the Brown decision in 1954:

The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is one of the great landmarks of American history. It is also a good example of the fact that the law is not about the law. Maybe one in 500 college students ever has read the decision, and probably very few Americans could tell you much about the legal questions involved in Brown, but the moral question at the heart of the case — whether an apartheid regime of “separate but [formally] equal” would be allowed to stand in these United States — is well understood. It was well understood by the Court at the time, too: Remarkably, that contentious issue was settled in a unanimous decision. Even Hugo Black, a member of the Ku Klux Klan named to the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt, was on board — but, in all fairness, Justice Black had not joined the Klan because he hated blacks: He had joined the Klan because he hated Catholics.

Black of course was the father of modern "separation of church and state" jurisprudence,  in which he employed the phrase he used in the KKK initiation oath when he was Kladd of the Klavern-- the initiator of new Klansman-- in Alabama.

"Separation of church and state" was the dog-whistle for anti-Catholic bigots. Still is.

Williamson recounts Goldwater's pioneering efforts in Phoenix to help blacks and advance integration.

He concludes:

Barry Goldwater was not the most important opponent of racial segregation in Arizona, nor was he the most important champion of desegregating the public schools. What he was was on the right side: He put his money, his political clout, his business connections, and his reputation at the service of a cause that was right and just. While he was doing all that, his eventual nemesis, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a low-rent practitioner of the most crass sort of racist politics, was gutting anti-lynching laws and assuring Democrats that he would offer those “uppity Negroes” “just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” 

For more than a century, the Republican party had been the party of civil rights, of abolition, of emancipation, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and the NAACP did not represent a break from that tradition, but a continuation of it. 

It was a masterpiece of politics that allowed the Democrats to convince the electorate that they were the party of civil rights, that they had not until the day before yesterday been the party of lynching — even as that very same cabal of segregationist Democrats that had tried to block or gut every single significant piece of civil-rights legislation for decades, still led by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, remained comfortably entrenched in the Senate. To hear the story told today, you would almost think that it was the Republican Barry Goldwater, not the Democrat George Wallace, who stood in the schoolhouse door shouting “Segregation forever!” Goldwater believed that Title II and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were unconstitutional. How many Americans even know what is in those sections? About as many as understand the legal arguments surrounding Brown. 

The problem for Republicans is that reclaiming their reputation as the party of civil rights requires a party leadership that wants to do so, because it cherishes that tradition and the values that it represents. It is not obvious that the Republican party has such leaders at the moment. The Party of Lincoln seems perfectly happy to be little more than the Party of the Chamber of Commerce. We should not turn our noses up at commerce — though Napoleon meant it as an insult, it was Britain’s glory to be “a nation of shopkeepers” — but it was not commerce alone that freed the slaves or built the nation.

Please read the whole thing.

Republicans need to remind Americans that they, not the Democrats, are the party of racial equality and colorblind law. Democrats have a two hundred year history of race-baiting-- of using race to advance their politics.

We need policies that help minorities and all Americans-- policies that strengthen the family, make the streets safe, revive the economy-- and these policies need to be colorblind. There is much that needs doing, and we need to reject race-baiting and the policies of the Democrat party that destroy minority families, make minority streets into combat zones, and kill tens of millions of minority children in abortion clinics.