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Competing Visions

John J. Miller on Jesse Helms:

He “opposed civil rights”? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them.

Here’s an ad Helms helped make for Willis Smith’s 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Graham:

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

The “particular vision of civil rights” that Helms opposed was the vision in which African-Americans are permitted to work beside white people and in which the races are permitted to mingle.

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UPDATE: See also “The civil rights movement, as Dr. King calls it, has had an uncommon number of moral degenerates leading the parade”. Helms, unlike today’s National Review writers, didn’t seem to have been confused about this. He, like National Review, opposed civil rights.