Wednesday, December 15, 2010 Conservatives and the Civil Rights
Movement What was the political stance of most conservatives
toward the Civil Rights Movement? On May 26th, 2010 conservative
talk show host Glen Beck made an astonishing claim on his
nationally syndicated radio show. “We are on the right side of
history! We are on the side of individual freedoms and
liberties, and dammit, we will reclaim the civil rights
movement. We will take that movement—because we were the people
who did it in the first place.” This certainly would have been
news to Rosa Parks, Barbara Johns, Charles Houston, Fannie Lou
Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and others who
risked their lives to secure civil rights for black Americans.
Presumably, Beck meant that conservatives were “the people who
did it,” although he later added that he wanted to reclaim the
civil rights movement “from politics.” This is also a puzzling
statement, given that the Civil Rights Movement was a series of
inherently political acts: Rosa Par