Reagan's Race Record

J.P. Green wants it known that whatever Ronald Reagan was or wasn't doing in Philadelphia, MS he did have a terrible record on race issues; as Sidney Blumenthal has written:

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan travelled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights".

As president, Reagan aligned his justice department on the side of segregation, supporting the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in its case seeking federal funds for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. In 1983, when the supreme court decided against Bob Jones, Reagan, under fire from his right in the aftermath, gutted the Civil Rights Commission.

Indeed, though one of the only nice things one can say about George W. Bush is that he's made some kind of effort to detoxify the Republicans' image in minority communities, it's still the case that he's followed Ronald Reagan's lead in having the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department stop enforcing laws barring discrimination against racial minorities. We should probably understand that as part-and-parcel of the Bush administration's broad-based effort to stop enforcing all kinds of regulations that might burden business (indeed, as I pointed out once in a Cato Unbound essay, when libertarianism was actually tried in the form of the Goldwater campaign it turned out that the main constituency for it was among hard-core white supremacists) rather than racism as such.

Comments

Wow -- you mean it's okay to remember stuff about what actually happened, when it has to do with Reagan? I thought we had all just agreed that Reagan and His "Ideas" were the founding principles upon which we would forever live in happiness, and that the Democratic Party would restrict itself to offering uncontroversial agendas which also reflected His "Ideas"?

Posted by El Cid | November 9, 2007 4:13 PM

Can we now say that dirty, dirty David Brooks is as crazy as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or is that too impolite?

Posted by sy | November 9, 2007 4:14 PM

First, States Rights may be a codeword for white supremecists. They can take it how they want, but more importantly, it's part of the Bill of Rights. Reagn was promising to uphold it. In fact, the question of how an enclave can exist as part of an entire nation may be one of the most important issues of this century. Also, the big states rights issue at the time was the Sage Brush Rebellion. The day Reagan spoke, Bruce Babbit had an editorial for states rights in the New York Times. Also, appeals to racial segregation was hardly a winning issue among southern whites in 1980. The last person to win in the south by courting the segregationist vote was in 1970 by Reagan's opponent, Jimmy Carter.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein | November 9, 2007 4:34 PM

First, States Rights may be a codeword for white supremecists. They can take it how they want, but more importantly, it's part of the Bill of Rights. Reagn was promising to uphold it. In fact, the question of how an enclave can exist as part of an entire nation may be one of the most important issues of this century. Also, the big states rights issue at the time was the Sage Brush Rebellion.

Exactly right. As a resident of the South then, I can't tell you how much my rural white neighbors were talking about that danged Sage Brush Rebellion. Every time they would talk about "states' rights", they must have been talking about Bruce Babbit. Didn't Babbit always carry around a rebel flag?

And no one talked about the importance of the Bill of Rights more than my rural Southern neighbors, friends, and fellow students. Man, in the South you could hardly hear anyone talking about Reagan without them mentioning their fervent love of the Constitution and equal rights for all.

It was a crazy time. We would all have been shocked, just shocked for anyone to have mentioned the notion, the crazy crazy notion, that anyone around us might have been thinking that Reagan was saying he was going to finally take on the n***ers.

Posted by El Cid | November 9, 2007 4:44 PM

"Indeed, though one of the only nice things one can say about George W. Bush is that he's made some kind of effort to detoxify the Republicans' image in minority communities"

No, it's made some kind of effort to appear with minorities to help the image of Bush and the GOP among moderate white voters. Bush was the first President since 2003 who didn't speak at the NAACP's convention, has lower support among African-Americans than any GOP president ever, etc.

Bush has a decent record and performance among Latinos, but that's all backfired at this point.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | November 9, 2007 4:47 PM

That Reagan sounds like a total dick. Somewhere along the way he was canonized and now even the leftiest of lefties have to worship at his alter.

Posted by 2cynicalbyhalf | November 9, 2007 4:53 PM

First, States Rights may be a codeword for white supremecists. They can take it how they want, but more importantly, it's part of the Bill of Rights.

To the extent that the 14th Amendment conflicts with earlier parts of the Constitution, it supersedes them.

Posted by Herschel | November 9, 2007 5:19 PM

Oh, so _that's_ why the Ku Klux Klan ran amok in the 1980s and not a single discrimination lawsuit was filed by the government in the entire country. I'd always been wondering why the living hell of Jim Crow redescended up on America in the 1980s, and now I know.

Oh, wait, except that didn't, technically, happen. In fact, pretty much the opposite happened as the institutions enforcing political correctness gathered power.

It's aways amusing to see Matt expound on eras before about the Lewinsky Affair -- his mental model resembles those very old maps that fill in blank areas with the words "Here be dragons!"

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 9, 2007 5:34 PM

said the "state's rights" enthusiast.

Posted by Woody Bombay | November 9, 2007 5:37 PM

I was in a majority-black junior high when Reagan went to Mississippi and gave that speech, and we knew what it meant. It didn't matter so much what specific words he said, but choosing that location to kick off his election campaign. (I'm not black, but the white kids who knew anything about politics figured it out too.) Of course we were only in junior high, so we were getting this from our parents, and they also knew what it meant.

Everything else about the Neshoba County Fair as obligatory whistle stop is revisionist claptrap. He chose to kick off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and that is the founding basis for the 1980 election - the message that he would be that little bit more on white folks' side and they wouldn't have to hear about civil rights (I'm talking about a message to "Reagan Democrats" here, not Klansmen).

Posted by Ben | November 9, 2007 5:53 PM

It's worth noting that Bush did a similar stunt to Reagan in his campaign-- he visited that very same Bob Jones University that Reagan defended all the way to the Supreme Court. I remember a lot of Bush apologists claimed he had no idea about the school's history, but those of us who were around in the early 1980's know that this couldn't possibly be true; that Supreme Court case was massively publicized (and decided 8-1, with only Rehnquist dissenting).

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 9, 2007 6:13 PM

Here's Kevin Drum in 2004:

But let's fast forward exactly eight years to August 4, 1988. Guess who's talking at the Neshoba County Fair? Here's the New York Times account:

"Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, bringing his campaign today to a sweltering Mississippi town that is at once in the heart of the conservative South and a place resonant with the anguished history of the civil rights movement, had to confront the region's enigmatic political character.

While he pledged to ''bring down the barriers to opportunity for all our people,'' he made only passing reference to the problems of American minorities in a speech to an almost entirely white crowd at the Neshoba County Fair, 24 years to the day since the bodies of three slain civil rights workers were found under an earthen dam nine miles from here.

Mr. Dukakis mentioned that he was near the birthplace of Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox who was born in nearby Meridian. But he did not mention the three young civil rights workers: Andrew Goodman and Michael H. Schwerner, both whites from New York, and James E. Chaney, a black who was born in Meridian. The three were slain on a back road by a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen on the night of June 21, 1964, and found 44 days later, on Aug. 4.

The omissions may have reflected the sensitivities of the Dukakis organization to the dilemmas at this campaign stop, at a time when he is trying to attract both white conservatives and blacks in the South.

On his airplane later, Mr. Dukakis noted that he had said in his speech that it was a ''special day'' and insisted that everyone knew what he meant. He also said he had come to Neshoba County to talk about economic development, which he called the ''the fundamental issue facing the people of Mississippi and the people of the South.''

Does Ronald Reagan deserve criticism for opening his campaign at Neshoba and using the occasion to mention his support for states' rights to an all-white Southern crowd? Yes.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 9, 2007 6:19 PM

Kevin Drum went on in the Washington Monthly:

"On the other hand, he's not the only candidate to head to Neshoba shortly after being nominated, and he's not the only one to shade his words there to court Southern whites. In fact, even with Reagan's performance to learn from, Dukakis decided to play pretty much the same game eight years later."

http://www2.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004116.php

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 9, 2007 6:21 PM

Reagan didn't "kick off" his campaign in Philadelphia. That was his first stop after the GOP convention. He went there right after the convention because that's when it was held.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein | November 9, 2007 7:19 PM

"He went there right after the convention because that's when it was held."

That's pretty circular. You're totally eliding Reagan's _choice_ to go there at that time.

It's like saying: Tom did such and such specifically after event X because event X occurred when it did."

What about Tom's decision to react by ACTING after Event X?

And Reagan's decision to go to Philadelphia, MS, immediately after the Convention.

And, in other news, Sailer, if you don't like Black people, or think they're inferior, couldn't you just come out and say it? It is only in light of such an inference that your various utterances make sense.

Posted by Daniel Shays | November 9, 2007 7:34 PM

Lee Atwater on Reagan's version of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'

Posted by croatoan | November 9, 2007 8:41 PM

Sure, croatoan, but obviously Lee Atwater was just talking about the Sage Brush Rebellion, and not anything racist or anything like that, and any way, it's not like Lee Atwater had anything to do with any Republican political campaigns, so what did he know anyway?

Posted by El Cid | November 9, 2007 11:01 PM

"indeed, as I pointed out once in a Cato Unbound essay, when libertarianism was actually tried in the form of the Goldwater campaign it turned out that the main constituency for it was among hard-core white supremacists)"

Since when did "libertarianism" (big-L or small-l) have anything to do with Barry Goldwater?

And the notion that "hard-core white supremacists" are "libertarians" is just bizarre. Just being anti-Federal-government for whatever racist reasons is not "libertarian."

Another ignorant Matt post. I swear, sometimes Matt seems to be trying to demonstrate that he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, even on matters such as basic definitions.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 10, 2007 1:02 AM

If you don't understand Barry Goldwater was a libertarian, you don't understand the world around you. I'm confused at best that you could make the statement that "libertarianism "had nothing to do with Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater basically LEFT the Republican party because he was sickened by their move to an unprincipled stance away from freedom. By the end of his life, Goldwater was endorsing pro-choice Democrats because they were for "freedom".

Explain your libertarian stance- I'd be interested to see how you frame Barry Goldwater.

Posted by John Polansky | November 12, 2007 5:14 PM