THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THE ARGUMENT FOR INTEGRATION CHANGES | 2002-12-21

In the 1950s, the argument for integration was that it would end diversity. Everybody in every white majority country would eventually become a uniform brown. Funny, integration has never been demanded of any non-white country!

This ideal of ending all diversity in white countries was preached by Franz Boas as the means of getting rid of the white race, which he viewed as the common enemy of Jews and all other minority groups.

To be fair, a few of the most outspoken opponents of integration were Jews. The founder of US News and World Report, David Lawrence, demanded the repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1961 his issue commemorating the beginning of the War to keep the South was the best case ever made for the Southern Cause.

Right through the 1960s, the NAACP never had a single black president. They were all leftist Jews.

But by the 1960s, some blacks started to wonder what BLACKS would get out of all this. Some black leaders began to realize that "Negroes" was not just a hard word for Southerners to pronounce, it was also hard for BLACKS to pronounce. It had never occurred to any civil rights leaders that blacks had any purpose except as a battering ram against whites, and no black appointed as a Leader had questioned that goal.

So in the 1960s the old goal of getting rid of whitey was not enough. The argument for integration changed.

Integration became "de-segregation". This "de-segregation" was now "to get equal schools for blacks." You bused white children to black schools, said liberals, so that whites would be forced to give black schools equal funding.