That all began to change with the emergence of National Review in 1955. The magazine was launched in opposition to the moderate Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower, who was seen as being soft on communism and all too willing to compromise with liberals. And among the policies National Review objected to was Eisenhower’s enforcement of civil rights laws. In a famous 1957 editorial written by National Review founder William F. Buckley, the magazine argued that the South “must prevail.” Is the white community in the South, the editorial asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” Buckley did not flinch from providing a blunt answer. “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” This position would be re-iterated by the magazine many times. In a 1960 editorial, the magazine wrote, “In the Deep South the Negroes are, by comparison with the whites, retarded.”

The stance laid out by National Review in the late 1950s and early 1960s was an innovative one. Before the magazine made Southern racism integral to right-wing ideology, Northern conservatives affiliated with the Republican Party felt no need to oppose civil-rights measures—and certainly no impetus to take the side of preserving Jim Crow segregation. Quite the reverse, in fact: Leading Republicans like Richard Nixon, eager to secure the African-American vote in the North in his 1960 race against John F. Kennedy, were competing with Democrats to be seen as civil rights champions.

Where did National Review’s sympathy for the white South stem from? In Buckley’s case, part of it was personal. The Buckley family had a plantation in South Carolina which the historian Garry Wills, who was close to Buckley in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote about in a 2009 essay in the Atlantic. “His mother was a southern belle from New Orleans whose grandfather had been a Confederate soldier at Shiloh,” Wills recalled. “She kept the attitude toward blacks of her upbringing. One time, when we were sailing and stopped at Charleston, South Carolina, Bill took me to his father’s winter home. When we arrived, we were greeted by a black retainer who had known Bill from his childhood—he called him ‘Master Billy.’ It was not surprising that Bill and I would initially disagree about the civil-rights movement.”

But beyond Buckley’s personal quirks, the magazine supported white Southern resistance to the civil rights movement for both ideological and politically strategic reasons. Fiercely anti-communist, National Review saw the civil rights movement as symptomatic of a perilous trend toward egalitarianism—one that was allied with decolonization movements around the world. In purely political terms, the Southern backlash provided an opportunity for the insurgent conservatives to latch on to a mass movement—and move the ideological profile of the GOP to the right with a new base of support. With white Southerners resenting both liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans for pushing civil rights, Buckley and his allies in the fledgling conservative movement recognized that these folks could become reliable foot soldiers to support its larger war against the left—and make it politically viable.