(disclaimer - I have only touched on how horrible he was)
http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Ronald_Reagan_Civil_Rights.htmRonald Reagan on Civil RightsSupported Bob Jones Univ.’s miscegeny policy, inadvertently
The president was so cut off from the counsel of black Americans that he sometimes did not even realize when he was offending them. One example occurred when Reagan sided with Bob Jones University in a lawsuit to obtain federal tax exemptions that had been denied by the IRS. The IRS denied tax exemptions to segregated private schools. Many of them were schools such as Bob Jones University, which enrolled a handful of minority students but prohibited interracial dating and marriage. It was the basis of this discrimination that the IRS denied the tax exemption.
Reagan would later say that the case had never been presented to him as a civil rights issue. More astonishingly, he did not even know that many Christian schools practiced segregation.
Source: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, p.521-22 Jul 2, 1991
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Opposed Voting Rights Act of 1965 as “humiliating to South”
Reagan never supported the use of federal power to provide blacks with civil rights. He opposed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Reagan said in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South.” While he made political points with white southerners on this issue, he was sensitive to any suggestion that his stands on civil rights issues were politically or racially motivated, and he typically reacted to such criticisms as attacks on his personal integrity.
Source: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, p. 520 Jul 2, 1991
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http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/presidents/ronald-reagan/17 Jun 1966 California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying: "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964."http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1953700&columnId=1929301Reagan, the South and Civil RightsNPR.org, June 10, 2004 · Forty years after the passage of 1964 Civil Rights Act, history and politics are celebrating a strange convergence: It was the passage of the Civil Rights Act that launched the rise of the president who died last week, Ronald Reagan.
The Civil Rights Act, signed July 2, 1964, by President Lyndon Johnson, ended legal discrimination against blacks at hotels, restaurants and department stores. It also made discrimination illegal in hiring. Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee that year, decided to make himself a voice for opponents of the Act.
Goldwater said he supported the white Southern position on civil rights, which was that each and every state had a sovereign right to control its laws. The Arizona Republican argued that each American has the right to decide whom to hire, whom to do business with and whom to welcome in his or her restaurant. The senator was right at home with Southern politicians who called the Civil Rights Act an attack on "the Southern way of life."
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Ronald Reagan was key to the South's transition to Republican politics. Goldwater got the ball rolling, but Reagan was at his side from the very beginning. During the 1964 campaign, Reagan gave speeches in support of Goldwater and spoke out for what he called individual rights -- read that also as states' rights. Reagan also and portrayed any opposition as support for totalitarianism -- read that as communism.
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