Bruce Bartlett: Reagan and Neshoba
Right after receiving the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, Ronald Reagan gave his first campaign speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi on August 3. This is where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—had been murdered by local racists in the summer of 1964.
In the course of a fairly standard stump speech, Reagan unfortunately used the term “state’s rights.” Andrew Young, who had lately served as United Nations ambassador for Reagan’s opponent, Jimmy Carter, quickly seized upon this to charge that Reagan was using racial code words to signal his sympathy for Southern racism. However, when one reads what Reagan actually said, it is quite clear that he was talking about transferring federal functions to the states as part of downsizing the federal government, something he had advocated for many years. As Reagan said at Neshoba:
I believe there are programs…like education and others that should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax resources to fund them…. I believe in state’s rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.
One can agree or disagree about whether Reagan’s philosophy is a good one or a bad one, but it certainly isn’t racist. Nevertheless, it has long been charged that the very fact that Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi was itself racially inflammatory given the history of that location. But this overlooks the fact that Mississippi had voted for Carter in 1976 and was a state Reagan needed to win in 1980. Moreover, the Neshoba County Fair was not some backwater, but a major event. Indeed, it was the subject of a flattering profile in the June 1980 issue of National Geographic.
The person who pushed hardest for the Neshoba visit was Lanny Griffith, then executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party. He later explained that his advocacy was based solely on the numbers. Speaking about the Philadelphia location for Reagan’s speech, Griffith said, “It didn’t even occur to me the entire time—the problems with the civil rights workers. In Mississippi that was not the identity it [the county fair] had. Everybody thought of it as this amazing institution where all politics happened.”
Indeed, 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis made a point of speaking at the Neshoba County Fair without bothering to mention the martyred civil rights workers in his speech. Ironically, it was Reagan aides’ efforts to minimize the racial impact of the Neshoba speech by following it with a speech to the largely black National Urban League that caused much of the subsequent controversy. Lou Cannon of the Washington Post explained their thinking in a contemporary report:
Originally, Reagan was scheduled to make the Urban League appearance first, and then fly to deliver his speech here at the Neshoba County Fair. But some in the campaign objected to the symbolism of Reagan going to a community where three civil rights workers were slain with the complicity of local police officials in 1964. “It would have been like we were coming to Mississippi and winking at the folks here, saying we didn’t really mean to be talking to them Urban League folk,” said one Reagan source. “It would have been the wrong signal.”
Reagan followed his Neshoba speech with a strong pitch for black support at the Urban League convention in New York City. He even repeated his call for federal functions to be devolved to the states. As he would on other occasions as well, Reagan emphasized that the biggest problems of African Americans were the same ones affecting all Americans—inflation, unemployment and so on. This may not have been what the delegates wanted to hear, but it shows the sincerity of Reagan’s beliefs that he was willing to explain them to an audience he knew was unlikely to be receptive.
Over the years, Reagan’s Neshoba speech has often been cited by liberals like New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert as proof positive that the Republican Party has long courted the votes of Southern racists. Whatever the merits of this argument, the Neshoba speech is extremely weak evidence for it.