If you have evidence of it being race, please post it.
Are you sure?
Are you really, really sure?
Do you really, really want a 40 year old showing you up on an anonymous message board?
OK...don't say I didn't warn you...
Why The South Must Prevail
William F. Buckley
August 24th, 1957
...
The central question that emerges-and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal
-is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes -the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
...
What are such issues? Is school integration one? The NAACP and others insist that the Negroes as a unit want integrated schools. Others disagree, contending that most Negroes approve the social separation of the races. What if the NAACP is correct, and the matter comes to a vote in a community in which Negroes predominate? The Negroes would, according to democratic processes, win the election; but that is the kind of situation the White community will not permit. The White community will not count the marginal Negro vote. The man who didn't count it will be hauled up before a jury, he will plead not guilty, and the jury, upon deliberation, will find him not guilty. A federal judge, in a similar situation, might find the defendant guilty, a judgment which would affirm the law and conform with the relevant political abstractions, but whose consequences might be violent and anarchistic.
...
http://precaution.org/lib/buckley_why_the_south_must_prevail(conservatism_racism).19570824.pdf
Conservatism was/is a negative reaction to desegregation, as Buckley wrote.
So it's always been about race for Conservatives.