On the newshour last night Roger Wilkins pointed out several ways the old war criminal pandered to the anti-black voters.
It seems unlikely that the traitor had any idea what kind of button was there to be pushed at Philadelphia, Mississippi let alone how to push it without many people understanding what was being signaled to the folks that like to decorate their trees with people hung from ropes. So who was the resident panderer that fashioned the use of the fear of black people and helped to keep give it new life after Jimmy Carter had started to take America on a better path ?
Here are the main points Wilkins mentioned,
Reagan was an incredible combination of a person who was very optimistic,
upbeat, but underneath there were some really ugly parts of his politics.
He was, I said once before on this program, he capitalized on anti-black populism
by going to Philadelphia, Mississippi, for example, for his first speech
after the 1980 convention. Nobody had ever heard of Philadelphia,
Mississippi outside of Mississippi,
except as the place where three civil rights workers had been lynched in 1964,
It was there that he said "I believe in states rights".
Everybody knew what that meant.
He went to Stone Mountain, Georgia,
where the Ku Klux Klan used to burn its crosses,
and he said Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine.
He was rebuked by the Atlanta newspapers, they said we don't need that any more here.
He went to Charlotte, North Carolina one of the most successful busing
for integration programs in the country
and he said " I'm against busing "
and again the Charlotte papers rebuked him.
There are links at Google that say Trent Lott urged the first speech at Mississippi but was there a single mastermind of the race baiting or was it a group effort ?
Link to full text although Roger got very little time during the love fest.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/jan-june04/historians_reagan_6-7.html