Reagan and African-Americans

Today is Ronald Reagan’s birthday! To honor both that and Black History Month, this post will interact with a few quotes about Reagan and race in Lou Cannon’s President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs, 2000).

The quotes are in italics:

I do not believe that Reagan was racially prejudiced in the normal meaning of the term. He had been taught by his parents that racial intolerance was abhorrent, and the many people I interviewed who knew him as a young man were unanimous in believing that he absorbed these lessons. In his autobiography Reagan tells how he volunteered to take Eureka College’s two black football players into his home in Dixon after they were refused admission at a hotel on one of the team’s trips to an Illinois college. The players were welcomed by Reagan’s parents, as Reagan had known they would be. One of these players was William Franklin Burghardt, who had played center on the line next to Reagan. The two became friends and corresponded regularly until Burghardt’s death in 1981. Burghardt vividly remembered the incident where he and his black teammate had been refused admission to the hotel and supported Reagan’s account of what had happened. ‘I just don’t think he [Reagan] was conscious of race at all,’ Burghardt said in 1981. ‘If you listened to the Carter debate during the campaign, Reagan said that when he was growing up they didn’t know they had a race problem. It was the dumbest thing a grown person could say, but he’d never seen it. I believe that [the hotel incident] was his first experience of that sort.

Racial segregation was at the time routine in many communities in the Middle West. Reagan was opposed to it. He had helped recruit Burghardt to play at Eureka from Greenfield, Illinois, where his grandfather and uncle worked as barbers. Nearly a half century later, when he was governor, Reagan named a black to the state board that licenses and regulated the barber industry in California. When Deaver asked him why he was bothering to do this, since he had so little political support among blacks, Reagan explained that he had once been told by a black that he had been turned away by a white barber who said he didn’t know how to cut a black man’s hair. “If I put a black man on a barber’s board this isn’t going to happen,” Reagan said. “It’s the right thing to do.” (Cannon 457-458)

Here are my reactions:

1. These two quotes present the positive side of Reagan’s stance on race (i.e., he personally opposed segregation). On pages 454-463, Cannon argues that Reagan’s positions were much more complicated, since he tended to oppose the use of federal power to enforce civil rights legislation. Cannon cites facts to support his argument, such as Reagan’s 1988 veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act.

Reagan, however, presents a different picture in his autobiography, Ronald Reagan: An American Life (New York: Pocket, 1990). He states: “Funding for enforcement of civil rights laws went up eighteen percent over my eight years in office. We took the lead in developing new civil rights legislation that strengthened the Fair Housing Act of 1968. And proportionately, blacks benefited more than any other racial group from our economic policies” (Reagan 401). Reagan refers to the increase in African-American income and employment that occurred during his Administration.

Who’s right? On the one hand, Reagan had a reputation for exaggeration and remembering events in a distorted manner, as critics claimed that Reagan tended to see what he wanted to see. On the other hand, the Left’s mythology is not always accurate, either. Many liberal Democrats referred to Republican “cuts” in Medicare spending during the 1990’s, when actually the Republicans were proposing a slow-down of an increase. They say poverty increased when George W. Bush was Governor of Texas, when it went down. They called Bush judicial nominee Charles Pickering a racist, even though he put his life at stake in the racist South by sending his kids to an integrated school. Conservatives are usually not as bad as liberals like to portray them.

2. “Whoopee! So he appointed an African-American to the barber board when he was governor,” cynics will probably say. But his autobiography says that he did more than that as governor of California. Reagan narrates that he secretly met with African-Americans shortly after he became governor, and he found concern that blacks couldn’t get state jobs, outside of janitorial positions. Reagan discovered that “state civil service tests were slanted against them,” and he tried to correct that problem to make sure that “everyone got an even break” (Reagan 164-165).

3. Some may dismiss the story of Reagan and the barber board, but I like it for three reasons. First, it shows how Reagan responded to individuals. In the American Experience documentary on Reagan, I think it was Ron Reagan who said that Reagan was socially-conscious when he was brought face-to-face with an individual’s plight. For example, although Reagan signed legislation to reduce the welfare state, he sent a check to a mother who had problems making ends meet. When she framed her check instead, Reagan sent her another one so she’d have enough money to eat.

Second, it shows Reagan was eager to hear from people who did not politically support him. He was somewhat like Obama, who has met with conservatives and Republicans since the onset of his Administration. Reagan not only sought advice from African-Americans, but he also met with Thurgood Marshall when the justice accused him of being a racist. “That night, I think I made a friend,” Reagan writes (Reagan 402). In a time when we seek bipartisanship in an intensely divided political climate, Reagan serves as a historical role-model of someone who reached out to the other side, even as he held fast to his own conservative convictions.

The third reason is that I had an experience a while back with the barber issue. When I was at DePauw, I often got annoyed because black students would set up a barber shop in my dorm’s restroom. I didn’t like having to muddle through a crowd when I used the toilet, washed my hands, and took a shower! But my mom told me that they do this because no one else will cut their hair, which was probably true in the predominantly white community of Greencastle, Indiana. I felt bad about the exclusion of African-Americans in this situation, especially when I can walk in anywhere to get a haircut. Heck, I’ve gone into black hair salons, and they’re willing to cut my hair! Although I still got a little annoyed when the black students set up their barber shop in the dorm restroom, I at least understood where they were coming from.

4. The statement that Reagan made in his debate with Carter was this: “I am eternally optimistic, and I happen to believe that we’ve made great progress from the days when I was young and when this country didn’t even know it had a racial problem. I know those things can grow out of despair in an inner city, when there’s hopelessness at home, lack of work, and so forth.” I can understand why people would have problems with this statement, since one can read it to say that America was unaware of racial discrimination when Reagan was younger. But he may be saying that, during his childhood, many assumed that everyone was satisfied with the status quo, when actually that was not the case. Whatever one’s interpretation of his statement, Reagan does acknowledge that the country has had a lot of racial problems over the course of its history, even when he was a child.

Reagan was not perfect, but he was a good man, and his character extended to how he addressed race issues.