Sheets of Philadelphia

I've always been troubled by Ronald Reagan's decision to open his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Philadelphia is really only known for one thing -- the murder of three civil rights workers there in 1964. I've never heard a satisfactory explanation for why the Reagan campaign chose Philadelphia as its kickoff stop. In a well-written, critical-but-not-sneering column, William Raspberry again broaches the subject, and adds that Reagan's Philadelphia speech made mention of"states' rights," an important principle unfortunately co-opted by Confederate apologists and segregationists.

The Media Research Center's Brent Bozell responds:

Actually, most of the speech targeted the failures of Jimmy Carter, but Reagan said,"I believe in states' rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can at the private level."

The weird thing about this is that we’ve almost never seen this anecdote in all the liberal screeds of the 1980s and 1990s. You won’t find it much in old TV news transcripts or news magazine stories. The main purveyor of this spin line over the last twenty years is....Jesse Jackson.

But every reporter who recycled Jesse’s old tale left out several crucial facts. First, Reagan wasn’t speaking in code to the KKK. He was dead serious about granting federal powers back to the states, period. One of his primary initiatives was a"New Federalism" that would reverse the trend of centralizing all government power in Washington, returning it to states and localities with block grants.

Second, on the day after the supposedly racist-encouraging Mississippi speech, Reagan traveled to New York for a speech to the Urban League, where the Washington Post reported on August 5, 1980 that Reagan declared,"I am committed to the protection of the civil rights of black Americans. That commitment is interwoven into every phase of the programs I will propose." Adviser Martin Anderson explained Reagan would uphold ongoing"affirmative action" programs. Do those sound like code words for Southern racists? That might explain why the story didn’t become much of a left-wing legend back in the 1980s.

Okay. But that still doesn't answer the question: Of all the strategic places to open a campaign, why did the Reagan campaign pick a relatively small town known only for the murder of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman?

Reagan wasn't a racist. His personal letters and private reflections made public over the years confirm that. But he couldn't have been ignorant of Philadelphia's history. Seems to me the only logical conclusion here is that Reagan calculated the support he'd get from the working white south for the move's symoblism was more important to him than avoiding giving implied approval to the south's nasty racial history.

I think it's an ugly blemish on his record.