Reagan had Strained Relations with Black America

By: BlackAmericaWeb.com and Associated Press

On the death of former President Ronald W. Reagan, a longtime civil rights adversary of the 40th U.S. president said Americans should remember the strained relationship Reagan had with black America throughout the 1980s.

“True, Ronald Reagan was a persuasive and funny personality,” Mary Frances Berry, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told BlackAmericaWeb.com Sunday. “But it was also true that his policies were pernicious as far as African-Americans and anyone in subservient groups were concerned.

“For example, he tried to redirect civil rights policies from helping African-Americans achieve equality of opportunity and justice to focus on white males and reverse discrimination. He also appointed people to the Justice Department and to civil rights jobs who asserted that position.

“It was a very evil time, a scoundrel time for people trying to advance the cause of equality for black folk,” said Berry, also chair of U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Berry also said, “He [Reagan] fired me because I criticized his policies. I sued and the courts agreed with me.” At that time black conservative Clarence M. Pendleton was appointed chairman of the commission. Pendleton died in 1988 at age 57.

Berry and others also tangled with the Reagan administration over apartheid and second-class citizenship for blacks in South Africa and U.S. policy, then called “constructive engagement,” that supported white minority rule and black repression.

“Me, Randall Robinson and Walter Faunteroy started protests at the South African Embassy,” said Berry. “That became a national movement. We got a sanctions bill passed [in Congress] and he [Reagan] had to be overridden.”

U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md., said in a statement, “While the members of the Congressional Black Caucus did not always agree with President Reagan on issues of public policy, he was an honorable and decent man.”

The CBC chairman also said, “We applauded his signing into law the legislation the Congressional Black Caucus had long pushed for making Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a federal holiday.” That occurred in 1983.

From all corners of the planet, eulogies streamed in — a torrent of words for the president known as the Great Communicator, the man who aimed his message at regular people and whose enemies and friends agreed changed the world.

"Ronald Reagan needs no one to sing his praises," Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said. But they did anyway. The 40th president’s death evoked a world of remembrances Saturday from friends, Republican political soul mates and opponents who squared off against him.

"A man who changed history," said U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., whose party spent 12 years trying to reclaim the White House after Reagan captured it in 1980.

"He won the Cold War without firing a shot," former Republican National Committee chairman Jim Gilmore said.

The mourning in America was swift. Flags sank to half-staff. Ballparks went mute for the former Chicago Cubs announcer, and the Belmont Stakes held a moment of silence. In Dixon, Ill., Reagan's childhood home, Ken and Marilyn Knotts laid two roses under his statue.

In Paris, President Bush called it "a sad hour in the life of America." In England, Queen Elizabeth II mourned "a truly great American hero."

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan's friend and conservative counterpart across the Atlantic in the 1980s, invoked the "millions of men and women who live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued."

And from presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry: "Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate."

For Reagan, the praise capped a career built on image making and public relations. The former actor and his cadre of consultants defined the political landscape of the 1980s, carefully calibrating the populist message he offered to the world — more adeptly, perhaps, than any American president before him.

From coast to coast Saturday, Americans of all political persuasions invoked the pithy statements offered by the man whose crack staff helped make the term "sound bite" a household word. Among them: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

"No president in American history understood the timber of the American character better than Ronald Reagan," said Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa. Drew Lewis, Reagan's transportation secretary from 1981 to 1983, went further: "He was not the laid-back kind of lackadaisical person that he presented himself to be. That was a facade."

"Whether you agreed or disagreed with Ronald Reagan, you can't deny that he was honest, fought hard for what he believed in, and had the courage of his convictions," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

An anti-war rally in Los Angeles, however, offered a different point of view.

"He was the first time I voted Democratic. I couldn't believe they were going to run an actor for president," said Anna May Nelson, 67, of Burbank, Calif. "He could tell you a lie to your face and make you think everything was all right."

The world, too, offered farewells — from German President Johannes Rau to French leader Jacques Chirac to Australian transportation minister John Anderson.

"They wrote Truman off as a little haberdasher from Missouri and they wrote Reagan off as a B-grade actor, but in reality both have done a huge amount to lock in the freedoms that so many countless tens of millions of people, including ourselves, take for granted around the world," Anderson said.

In the nations of the former Soviet bloc, subjects of the communist sphere of influence that Reagan famously called the "Evil Empire," sentiment ran high.

"He is the one who allowed the breakup of the Soviet Union," said Bogdan Chireac, a foreign affairs analyst for the Romanian newspaper Adevarul. "May God rest his soul."

The overwhelming praise from public figures Saturday illustrated Reagan's ultimate political success — his elevation to national icon well before his death. Saturday's remarks were but a coda for the man remembered by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for his "cowboy grace and strength."

New York Gov. George Pataki, a Republican, offered a remembrance reminiscent of Reagan himself: "The sun has set on the remarkable life of the great man who reminded us it is always morning in America."