Looking Back at an Ugly Time
by Bob Herbert

Sometimes it helps to take a look back and see just how far we've come.

In a response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the nation's public schools desegregated, William F. Buckley Jr.'s guidebook to conservative thought, National Review, declared the following in the summer of 1957:

"The central question that emerges — and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of rights of American citizens, born Equal — is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. . . .
[more]

This Modern World
This in Salon. Go ahead and get a free day pass — it's worth it.