All too often, people – albeit especially progressives – assume that conservatives were strongly opposed to the civil rights movement, back in the early second part of the 20th century. Conservatives, most progressives believe, were opposed to equal rights and equal treatment because they were either racist or because they, well, opposed any change because they preferred the status quo out of fear that change may produce unwanted results and chaos.

William Voegeli takes a look at how William F. Buckley dealt with the civil rights movement. You can read his article in its entirety at Real Clear Politics.

Viewed from 2008, the movement Buckley led was detached from the civil rights struggle because conservatives, despite frequent and apparently sincere expressions of hope for racial harmony, rarely viewed the fight against pervasive, entrenched, and episodically brutal racial discrimination as a question of great moral urgency. Conservatives were personally opposed to Jim Crow as liberals of a later generation insisted they were personally opposed to abortion. Making the opposition personal was a way to keep the states, in the case of abortion, or the nation, when it came to segregation, from making it governmental.

Buckley did not mention race in his famous publisher’s statement in the inaugural issue of National Review. The magazine was going to stand athwart history and yell Stop. But it would be yelling at Communists, “jubilant” in the belief they had an “inside track to History,” and at liberals “who run this country” and who, having embraced relativism, rejected “fixed postulates…clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic” in favor of “radical social experimentation.”

It was within this framework that National Review conservatism addressed the issues raised by the civil rights movement. Integration and black progress were welcomed when they were the result of private actions like the boycotts of segregated buses or lunch counters, which Buckley judged “wholly defensible” and “wholly commendable.” He also praised a forerunner to the socially responsible mutual fund, an investment venture started in 1965 to raise capital for racially integrated housing developments, calling it “a project divorced from government that is directed at doing something about a concrete situation,” one that “depends for its success on the spontaneous support of individual people.”

The corollary was that conservatism opposed the civil rights agenda when it called for or depended on Big Government. “We frown on any effort of the Negroes to attain social equality by bending the instrument of the state to their purposes,” Buckley wrote in 1960.

Although many may still disagree with Buckley, I think it’s time for progressives to accept what should be rather obvious; conservatives, well many of them that is, did not oppose the civil rights movement in so far that they believed that whites and blacks should be segregated, they opposed it not because they were racists, or because they thought that the racist vote would help them win elections; they opposed some items on the agenda of the civil rights movement because of their philosophy of government. It is as simple as that. Conservatism did not oppose equal treatment, nor the emancipation of blacks. Not at all; at the very core of Anglo-Saxon conservatism lies the belief that all men are deserving of respect. At the very core of conservatism lies the belief that we are more than mere animals who can speak; there’s something more to life than meets the eye.

Does that excuse some of the mistakes conservatives made back in the day? No, it does not. But it does, most certainly, make it more understandable. Additionally, looking back, we may very well conclude that there were right about some things; forced integration, for instance, changed the powers of the US federal government dramatically. These powers have not just been used for the better, but also for worse. They have been abused, misused, and the results haven’t always been what people hoped they would be; there’s still a whole lot wrong with racial integration and interaction – as recent polls show – and American education – for instance – isn’t flawless either, to put it mildly.