Buckley Criticized for Remarks at NYPD Function

Apr. 5, 1965 - Criticism of remarks on civil rights demonstrations in Selma, Ala., made Sunday at a policemen’s communion breakfast in New York City by William F. Buckley Jr. came from several quarters today.

Buckley, the editor of the conservative National Review, had said that television cameras at Selma showed “police nightsticks descending upon the bodies of demonstrators” but did not show a 20-minute period in which demonstrators stood silently refusing to obey a police order to withdraw.

James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, said in a statement that Buckley’s remarks were both “outrageous and ominous.”

State Supreme Court Justice Samuel Hofstadter sent a telegram to New York Mayor Robert Wagner, who had been on the dais with Buckley, “to register deep concern and dismay at the reaction” of policemen who had applauded the speech and “at your silence in the face of those remarks.”

Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, said in a telegram to Wagner that the applause by the police “demands rebuke by you.”Jackie Robinson, the former baseball star, also sent the Mayor a telegram, asking if Wagner’s silence indicated “that you agree with Mr. Buckley’s sentiments?”In a statement, Buckley said: “I am shocked at the ease with which a routine job of misrepresentation by the press of a public speech can cause distinguished public figures to believe the unbelievable, namely that bigotry was applauded.”

“I spoke sympathetically of the plight of Negroes in the South,” Buckley added. “I deplored the violence in the South and the attitude of lackadaisical white Southerners toward it. I did criticize the general tendency of some of the noisy elements in our public life to jump to false and contumacious opinions about policemen.”

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