He Left a “Hostile Legacy for Blacks” when he left office back in 1989. He leaves it today.
The following column of the Washington Post, by Mary McGlory, said it all, and still says it all.
Washington Post
January 17, 1989
A Hostile Legacy for Blacks
BY MARY McGRORY
With regard to black America, President Reagan leaves office just the way he came in, with much rancor on both sides. Blacks are conspicuously dry-eyed, while the rest of the country puddles up over his departure.
He professes to be baffled and hurt by black criticism.
He has apparently forgotten his record.
He has adopted policies that have been consistently, even blatantly, hostile to black citizens. Then when they protest, he turns around and accuses them of prejudice against him.
One of his first acts in office was to try to obtain a tax exemption for Bob Jones University, a segregated southern school. It wasn't that he was bigoted, he said. He just had this purist desire to have Congress -- whose counsel on other matters he so vehemently rejected -- decide an important fiscal matter.
In the commotion that ensued, he had his press secretary say how upset he that anyone could dream he was prejudiced.
In his eight years in office, he has taken actions that suggest that if he is not a bigot, he might as well have been one as far as blacks were concerned.
He stripped the U.S. Civil Rights Commission of its key members and its powers. The chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, William Bradford Reynolds, found almost no examples of discrimination in school segregation, voting rights
and other areas of civil rights sensitivities. The Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan organization formed to take the place of the official body, cited "an across-the-board breakdown in the machinery constructed by six previous administrations to protect civil rights."
He tried to gut the Voting Rights Extension Act of 1982. The then-Senate majority leader Robert Dole, stepped in and foiled the attempt.
He defamed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the martyred Moses of his people. When Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), trying to block a national holiday in King's honor, questioned King's loyalty on the basis of sealed FBI records, Reagan, at a news conference,
defended Helms' "sincerity." When asked if he thought that King was a communist, he replied snidely, "We'll know in about 35 years, won't we?"
He met just once with members of the Black Congressional Caucus.
In his most serious insult to blacks, Reagan nominated appeals court Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Bork, a quirky and prolific conservative, had said, among other things, that the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act embodies "a principle of unsurpassed ugliness."
Yet Reagan professes to be baffled by the silence in the black section during the national chorus of hosannas, as he moves from one farewell to the next, taking bows before the Cabinet, the Congress, the military, and during his Saturday radio broadcasts.
On "60 minutes," in an interview with Mike Wallace, he launched one last poisoned arrow against the holdouts.
"Sometimes I wonder if they really mean what they say, because some of those leaders are doing very well leading organizations based on keeping alive the feeling that they're victims of prejudice."
That's a mean thing to say. Blacks, like everyone else, have their opportunists, but to suggest that there could be no other basis for regarding Reagan as a disaster for blacks just doesn't wash. It was like his swipe at the homeless, who also mar the picture he painted in his farewell address of a nation without troubles. He, of course, will soon live in a California mansion purchased for him by his friends.
To Mike Wallace, he once again defended himself against the charge that is never made: that he is a bigot. He cited his endorsement, as a young sportscaster, of letting blacks play baseball in the major leagues.
The old actor's timing, on the eve of Martin Luther King's holiday, was abysmal.
In a commemorative National Public Radio program for the King holiday, Roger Wilkins called Reagan "an ignorant savage" when it comes to black problems and concerns.
Wilkins and fellow-participants Eleanor Holmes Norton and Taylor Branch, author of "Parting the Waters," an epic new biography of King, voiced the hope that things will be better in the presidency of George Bush.
At least the president-elect observed King's birthday by telling black leaders he will devote himself to making King's dream of justice and peace come true. He sent his erstwhile campaign manager, Lee Atwater, now Republican National Committee chairman, to the Ebenezer Baptist Church to say the same thing to King's old congregation.
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©2003 The African Independent, Inc. All rights to republication are reserved.
