Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
In December, the Trump administration quietly removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth as holidays where visitors would be given free admission to national parks.
But this slight against the day honoring America’s most well-known and beloved civil rights leader, along with the anniversary marking Black emancipation from enslavement, did not occur in a vacuum.
In a statement from the NAACP, President Derrick Johnson described it as an “an attack on the truth of this nation’s history.”
The NAACP also noted that the attempted marginalization of these holidays came just months after President Donald Trump took office and began purging records and notations of key civil rights figures and moments.
Similarly, Trump and other Republicans—including right-wing institutions like Fox News—were quick to whitewash the legacy of conservative activist Charlie Kirk after his death. But, of course, left unmentioned was Kirk’s crusade to undermine the legacy of King, who he called “awful” and “not a good person.”
The national parks directive, the whitewashing, and the purge of history at the federal level are just the latest manifestations of decades of the right’s opposition to the Civil Rights movement.
This is occurring because, despite their attempts to rewrite U.S. history, conservatives were against the expansion of civil rights and vehemently opposed the work of King and other advocates for racial justice. They were on the wrong side of history then, and they’ve stayed there ever since.
For instance, the extremely influential conservative journal National Review declared in 1960 that “leadership in the South, then quite properly rests in white hands,” and described Black people living in the south as “retarded.”
This was not some fringe rhetoric. The 1964 campaign of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona is widely recognized as a foundational moment for the modern conservative movement, and Goldwater distinguished himself by opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
King had long held a position of political neutrality, hoping to get support for civil rights legislation from both parties. But Goldwater’s nomination led King to directly advocate for the reelection of President Lyndon Johnson, who backed the Civil Rights Act.
“For the first time, a major political party has nominated a man who articulates views that are totally out of harmony with the mainstream of American thought and views that are more in line with the 18th century than the 20th century,” King said during a 1964 press conference.
The Civil Rights movement was a direct challenge to conservative orthodoxy, advocating for a progressive change to American culture and dispensing with the old structure of society that excluded people of color. Conservatism decisively lost that battle, including southern factions of the Democratic Party, which later became Republican.
The right has been losing that battle for decades, though the trajectory to racial equality has not been a straight line forward. For many conservatives, that fight came to a head after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.
It was after this moment that Trump became the most vocal advocate of the racist birther conspiracy theory, which sought to undermine Obama’s legitimacy by falsely claiming that he was not a native-born American.
Conservatives promoted the lie, propping up racism without openly proclaiming their racism. Trump was even invited in 2012 to tout his endorsement of the GOP’s nominee, then-Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.
Four years later, this avatar of racism was elevated to lead the Republican Party—and has done so for nearly a decade now.
Trump and his fellow Republicans carry the torch for the same brand of bigotry as the conservative movement in the 1960s, but instead of openly using racial epithets—most of the time—they complain about concepts like “woke.”
But it is truly the same bigotry that has been a part of American life since the nation was founded on the backs of enslaved Black labor.
The attempted purge of holidays and rewriting of history is a continuation of this racist crusade. Today’s conservatives are simply the inheritors of Goldwater’s and National Review’s legacies.
While an increasingly diverse United States continues to reject these ideals, the right isn’t giving up the fight. They will continue to wage war on civil rights, even if they’re doomed to ultimately lose—that’s how much they cherish the myth of white superiority.
