Five days. Martin Luther King, Jr. hadn’t rested in peace for even a week when William F. Buckley Jr. exhumed him for an autopsy and a psychiatric evaluation.
On April 9, 1968, Buckley, then perhaps the most influential intellectual on the American right, declared that only madness could have led someone to murder King, who, by the way, probably brought that fate on himself.
Having assured readers of his National Review that it “would take a lunatic (his murderer… is sure to be one) to reason that Dr. King’s faults justified assassination,” Buckley then proclaimed that “the cretin who leveled his rifle at the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk… about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King… had so widely, and so indiscriminately, indulged in.” He concluded that the then unknown assassin was a “wildman” driven to his crazed act by the “transgressions” of his obviously flawed victim.
That amateurish diagnosis conveniently ignored Buckley’s consistent embrace of violence in defense of white supremacy. By characterizing James Earl Ray as a “lunatic,” Buckley, a devout Roman Catholic, absolved himself of guilt. He omitted his own earlier commandment that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail” and that sometimes it “cannot prevail except by violence” to instead manipulate the rhetoric of mental illness that still clouds our understanding of American reactionaries and their violence.
By the time Buckley speculated on the mind of King’s assassin, social scientists had spent decades trying to diagnose racism. Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany were their principal subjects, the Holocaust their main motivation. As historian Sander L. Gilman and sociologist James M. Thomas demonstrate in Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity, the Nazi genocide of European Jews encouraged research meant to stop the rise of other fascist regimes, avoid further atrocities committed in the name of racial supremacy, and facilitate the rehabilitation of post-World War II Germany. It made it fashionable to pathologize the right. From the 1930s into the 1950s, researchers speculated about the perverse workings of the deviant “authoritarian personality” and questioned whether education could “cure” racism and fascism. They diagnosed the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen as the terrible symptom of a “paranoid contagion” or “mass psychosis.”
Buckley confirmed the unintended consequences of liberals’ well-intentioned social science. During the Jim Crow era, the association of racism and racial violence with mental illness became ammunition for the right-wing defenders of the American-system of racial apartheid that had inspired the Nazis. It helped the National Review and the White Citizens Councils present themselves as respectable and lucid intellectuals and professionals, as fundamentally different from James Earl Ray, the Ku Klux Klan, and the other foot-soldiers of white supremacy.