Bob Herbert: "Righting Reagan's Wrongs?"

[muntrv]

Op-Ed Columnist
Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?

By BOB HERBERT
Published: November 13, 2007

Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.

Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20.

They hugged in the family’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the racial hell of Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage local blacks to register and vote.

It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism. “I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me many years later, “to tell him not to go.”

After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.

Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Another reminder that raygun was a racist jerk!!

[blm]

1. We could have had both Reagan and Bush1 exposed forever in the 90s.

Their illegal operations had been uncovered by a few dogged Dems in the congress and senate and laid out with the need to acquire some documents to nail their legacy coffins shut.

Except a Dem president decided that the country should move past all the issues of his predecessors' criminality and ignore all the outstanding matters of those illegal operations that came up throughout the 90s.