BUCKLEY'S LEGACY

NRO is going through their archives in celebration of William F. Buckley's 80th birthday. Here's a bit from a 1964 editorial marking the tenth anniversary of Brown v Board of Education that probably won't make the cut.

"But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named 'civil rights movement' – that is, the Negro revolt . . . . But the Court carries its share of the blame. Its decrees, beginning with Brown, have on the one hand encouraged the least responsible of the Negro leaders in the course of extra-legal and illegal struggle that we now witness around us. . . .

"Brown, as National Review declared many years ago, was bad law and bad sociology. We are now tasting its bitter fruits. Race relations in the country are ten times worse than in 1954."

Decades before The Bell Curve, Buckley and his magazine were practicing bad sociology in the service of bigotry.