Reagan and Race: The Politics

Divide and conquer: it's American as apple pie and Fourth of July.

Ronald Reagan was a master, possibly without ever perceiving what he did; always sincere about the malarkey he peddled, the man believed there was no racism in his policies as long as he personally was not racist.

For a collection of essays, Deconstructing Reagan: Conservative Mythology And America's Fortieth President, Jeremy D. Mayer contributed "Reagan and Race: Prophet of Color Blindness, Baiter of the Backlash."

Seeing the world in anecdotes and movie plot synopses as he did, Reagan's perception of racial discrimination was no different. Whenever the topic was raised, writes Mayer, "Reagan repeated two anecdotes endlessly"—his Catholic father forbade him to see "Birth of a Nation"; his college football team would have been stranded on the road, but Reagan's parents reacted as he expected, by welcoming the two black teammates he brought home to stay overnight.

Thirty years later, Reagan entered national politics as what Mayer calls "The Sunny Salesman of White Backlash." Speaking on national television in October 1964

... Reagan electrified Goldwater supporters with his powerful, bold rhetoric and extraordinary ease in delivery; but something was missing from the speech... Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was one of his major appeals for millions of Americans, [but] Reagan said not a word about race or civil rights.

This would be the pattern, with Reagan generally avoiding the subject. In the 1966 California governor's race, however, he used repeal of the state's law against housing discrimination as a property rights issue—after previously opposing national legislation on the grounds that housing was a state issue.

After that election, Reagan was a big enough star in the national party to be the pick of many to run for president by 1968. His chief rival was Nixon, and Mayer quotes a memo within the latter's organization—

"Reagan's strength derives from personal charisma, glamour, but primarily the ideological fervor of the Right and the emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him 'in his place' or at least to echo their own anger and frustration."

Mayer writes that

Ultimately, Nixon had to move far to the racial right to defeat the Reagan challenge. Although it is likely that Nixon would have adopted his southern strategy even if Reagan had never run for president, it might not have been such an anti-civil rights strategy had it not been for Reagan's pressure.

The Great Communicator: giving Richard Nixon lessons on the uses of race-baiting.

Reagan had only two years in politics by 1968, and Mayer asks:

How did Ronald Reagan, a Californian with no record of animosity toward blacks and no sustained cultural exposure to the American South, become so popular among racially conservative whites in such a brief period of time? In many ways, Reagan was the ideal face for racial conservatism. a movement desperately opposed to black progress but aware that open racism had become anathema to most Americans. Moreover, Reagan had traveled extensively in the South on behalf of General Electric, after his film career ended. Giving these speeches, as well as Republican party speeches throughout the South from 1964 to 1968, taught Reagan very well how to please a southern crowd without crossing lines of open racism. In addition, many of Reagan's other positions, on school prayer, taxes, foreign policy, federalism, and welfare, fit weIl with southern cultural conservatism. Reagan could allow many white southerners to believe that they had opposed the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act not because they hated or feared blacks, but because they believed in traditional American values... This plausible deniability on race was perhaps Reagan's greatest appeal to many racist whites.

Mayer suggests Reagan took advantage of a shift in political attitudes toward race:

Reagan was the first prophet of Republican color blindness on race. In the 1950s, the liberal line ... was that the government should step in to prevent official discrimination against blacks. The goal was a color-blind society. As the massive legacy of America's centuries of racism became ever clearer in the 1960s and 1970s, many liberals shifted to a policy of taking cognizance of race in an effort to eradicate racism and its powerful lingering effects. At the same time, many conservatives, gradually rejecting government tolerance of racism, adopted the color-blind rhetoric abandoned by the liberals. Reagan led this shift more than any other political figure. His faith that he lacked racial prejudice allowed him to take positions widely perceived as antiblack without any hesitation. A more introspective or ambivalent white politician might have retreated in the face of nearly unified black anger at his policy positions... such retreats were almost unknown in the campaigns and policies of Ronald Wilson Reagan.

In other words, Reagan showed the modern right-wing the path of psychological projection it has followed ever since, with its "you're the racist, for bringing up race!" line of attack.

Reagan sometimes made overt assertions—

In the midst of the rioting era, Reagan made this stunning statement: "The greatest proof of how far we've advanced in race relations is that the white community hasn't lifted a finger against the Negroes." In addition to being factually incorrect (many more blacks were killed by whites in the riots of the 1960s than the converse), praising whites for not taking vengeance against blacks as they had in the recent past was the kind of language that fed the moral legitimacy of the white backlash.

As Reagan later campaigned for the presidency against Gerald Ford—

Ford's campaign accurately perceived that Reagan's appeal was deeply related to his positions on race. Ford's pollster found that Reagan supporters were almost indistinguishable in attitude from [George] Wallace supporters...

... In his famous "welfare queen" anecdote, told repeatedly in the 1976 campaign, Reagan echoed Wallace in using welfare to court the white backlash. In Reagan's telling, a woman in the Midwest had used as many as nineteen identities to bilk the government of hundreds of thousands of tax dollars. While Reagan never identified the woman's race, the original story was well known, at least to many in the Midwest. The facts were also well known to many reporters, who pointed out to Reagan that he was greatly exaggerating the case. The actual woman had taken on just two identities, and the amount of money defrauded was exponentially less than Reagan claimed. Reagan continued to give his erroneous version, which was very popular with his audiences. In perhaps the most odious outreach to white racism of the 1976 campaign, Reagan supporters in North Carolina distributed a flyer alleging that Ford was going to put Senator Edward Brooke, a moderate black Republican, on the ticket as his vice president.

By 1980, when he began the primaries as front-runner, Reagan mainly kept quiet about civil rights issues, unless questioned directly.

In one "off-message" moment, Reagan blamed the VRA [Voting Rights Amendment] for the "humiliation" it brought the South. Others might have felt that the American South should have been embarrassed and humiliated by the decades of racist violence and systemic disenfranchisement that made the VRA so necessary, but for Reagan, it was the reporting requirements that were humiliating.

With his history of this kind of signaling, it may have been shocking for him to open his campaign with a states' rights speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi, but it should have been no surprise.

Not only did Reagan start his campaign in Neshoba, but his speech endorsed states' rights, the very principle advocated by those who murdered the three civil rights martyrs.

(More on that campaign opener.)

Following Reagan's first term, "the few black leaders who had supported him in 1980 were nowhere to be found in his reelection effort." Mayer adds—

Almost the only outreach Reagan's campaign had to black voters was a pathetic billboard campaign telling blacks that three black boxers (Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and Floyd Patterson) were behind Reagan.

In his two terms, the most public involvement with race was over legislation to observe the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., long demonized by the Right:

On the day [April 4, 1968] King was shot, Reagan called the assassination "a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they'd break." The comparison between nonviolent marches and boycotts against racial discrimination and the assassination of a black leader ... echoed tbe criticisms of King's segregationist opponents since his earliest campaigns against racism ... It was perhaps a historical irony that the long movement to honor King with a holiday would finally pass through Congress at a time when the man who had to sign the legislation was a lifelong opponent of government actions in defense of black civil rights.

President Reagan was against the legislation, and

Writing to a hard-core right-winger who opposed the King holiday because of King's sexual immorality and left-wing tendencies, Reagan wrote, "I have the reservations you have but there the perception of too many people is based on an image not reality. Indeed to them the perception is reality. We hope some modification might still take place in Congress."

Though his sympathies were with the conservative allies who pressed him to veto the legislation, he yielded to the political necessity of signing.

In the end, writes Mayer,

While Reagan did not leave much of a policy legacy on civil rights directly, his appointments to the judiciary have had and will continue to have a serious impact on race relations. Reagan appointed hundreds of federal judges who, like him, were either ambivalent about or hostile to the great achievements of the civil rights movement. In all the major cases trimming back Warren court decisions or affirmative action, Reagan appointees occupy a prominent position... while Reagan never succeeded in ending affirmative action or weakening the Voting Rights Act directly, his appointees went a long way toward his stated goals.