A seminal essay of estrangement appeared just before Birmingham in 1963, when Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz wrote that although he had grown up paying lip service to civil rights, “I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.” Dismissing integration and democracy as false hopes for “the Negro problem in this country,” Podhoretz saw no solution until “skin color does in fact disappear,” and confessed a desperate fantasy: “it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.”
