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Reagan pandered to worst form of racial prejudice
Article Launched: 11/14/2007 01:35:00 AM PST

Let's set the record straight on Ronald Reagan's campaign kickoff in
1980.
Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her
husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to
David's brother, Andrew, who was 20.

They hugged in the family's apartment on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the racial hell of
Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage local blacks to
register and vote.

It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew's parents were reluctant to let
him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights
and the benefits of social activism. "I didn't have the right,"
Carolyn Goodman would tell me many years later, "to tell him not to
go."

After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of
Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Miss., a vicious white-supremacist
stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had
firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified
worshipers.

Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his
arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney
disappeared. Their bodies wouldn't be found until August. All had been
murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people
trying to secure the rights of blacks.

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They
constituted Neshoba County's primary claim to fame when Reagan won the
Republican Party's nomination for president in 1980. The case was
still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were
still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was
still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as
the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted
at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous
crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: "We want Reagan! We want Reagan!"

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the
fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd,
"I believe in states' rights."

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by
their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which
was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this
appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won't wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile
and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old
race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at
the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans - they all
knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by
racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians
started chirping about "states' rights" to white people in places like
Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the
blacks, we're with you.

And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act
of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney
were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax
exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination.
And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil
rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime
in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited
on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is
no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.

To see Reagan's appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper
context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights
workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican
strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like "states'
rights" in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the
success of the GOP's Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in
the very first year of the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was
one of the primary keys to his political success.

The suggestion that the Gipper didn't know exactly what message he was
telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed.
Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.