Jack White: Why I Won't Celebrate Ronald Reagan's 100th Birthday
[Jack White is a frequent contributor to The Root.]
Like most African Americans old enough to shudder with revulsion when they remember Ronald Reagan's presidency, I won't be joining the hagiographical celebration of the late conservative saint's 100th birthday that is scheduled to take place this weekend. There will simply be too many lies.
The celebrations won't be talking about it, but neither the passage of time nor President Barack Obama's oft-stated admiration for Reagan's transformational politics can make me forget how the Gipper used the fears and resentments of angry white people to get elected.
I could make a long, long list of the signals Reagan sent to let racists know that they would have a friend in the White House. Among them was his decision -- urged by, among others, the affably bigoted former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott -- to deliver the first major speech of his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s' ugliest cases of racist violence. Reagan gave a ringing declaration of his support for "states' rights" -- code words for resistance to black advances, and clearly understood by white Southerners....
Read entire article at The Root
Like most African Americans old enough to shudder with revulsion when they remember Ronald Reagan's presidency, I won't be joining the hagiographical celebration of the late conservative saint's 100th birthday that is scheduled to take place this weekend. There will simply be too many lies.
The celebrations won't be talking about it, but neither the passage of time nor President Barack Obama's oft-stated admiration for Reagan's transformational politics can make me forget how the Gipper used the fears and resentments of angry white people to get elected.
I could make a long, long list of the signals Reagan sent to let racists know that they would have a friend in the White House. Among them was his decision -- urged by, among others, the affably bigoted former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott -- to deliver the first major speech of his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s' ugliest cases of racist violence. Reagan gave a ringing declaration of his support for "states' rights" -- code words for resistance to black advances, and clearly understood by white Southerners....