The Governor of California and newly minted Republican nominee for president steps to the lectern on a scorching August day. A large American flag is draped behind him, but the white people in the crowd before him wave different flags: some hold the Confederate flag, others the Mississippi state flag, which also happens to include a Confederate flag within it. This is the Neshoba County Fair. The year is 1980. And this is Ronald Reagan’s coming out party.
Summertime in the US is packed with fairs across the country, but none are quite like Neshoba. Over 600 colorful cabins that have been in Mississippi families for generations surround the fairgrounds. Locals call it “Mississippi’s Giant House Party.”
Held since 1889, the fair is a gathering spot for statewide candidates, but never a presidential contender. National candidates rarely appeared and certainly not hated Republicans — the party that freed the slaves and forced martial law and Reconstruction on the South.
Message
The opening of a general election campaign is the moment a candidate shifts from winning their party’s nomination to winning voters of all affiliations. The location and message are chosen carefully by political advisers and media strategists. Reagan, the ‘Great Communicator,’ understood exactly why he was here.
He opened his speech:
I know that in speaking to this crowd, that I’m speaking to what has to be about 90 percent Democrat. I just meant by party affiliation. I didn’t mean how you feel now. I was a Democrat most of my life myself.
Reagan was a rabid New Deal supporter who memorized FDR’s speeches but by the 1960s felt that “The Democratic Party left me.” He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Reagan was here to finally fulfill the GOP dream of shifting racist southern whites to the party of Lincoln, and the symbolism would be lost on no one. A Mississippi GOP official had suggested the site a year earlier noting that this would help the party lure the “George Wallace-inclined voters.” George Wallace was the infamous segregationist Alabama governor who sought the Democratic nomination on multiple occasions, including against sitting-president LBJ over his supports for civil rights. Wallaces’ motto as he attempted to stop Black students from entering the University of Alabama:
Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
The split between the ‘yellow dog’ southern Democrats, who would vote for a mutt before they’d vote for a Republican, and the rest of the party, peaked in the 1960s, but started in 1948. The Democratic National Convention that year was marred by infighting between liberal northerners who wanted support for voting rights and anti-lynching laws in the platform, and southerners vehemently opposed. Many southern delegates walked out of the DNC after losing the vote. Those who stayed nominated a protest candidate against President Harry Truman.
Two weeks later, Truman would issue an Executive Order integrating the military and federal government. The Dixiecrats held their own nominating convention supporting Strom Thurmond for president. They called themselves the States’ Rights Party.
The integration of schools was still a hot-button issue at the close of the 1970s. A young Joe Biden sought alliance with other Democrats, including openly-racist Mississippi politicians to halt federally mandated busing programs.
But a shift was occurring. The Grand Wizard of the KKK said the Republican platform in 1980, “Reads as if it was written by a Klansman,” and openly endorsed Ronald Reagan.
In this context, Reagan told the fair goers that control of education should be with the states. And then he said the two words they had been longing to hear:
I believe in states’ rights. … And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.
Place
The words sent the crowd of 30,000 into a frenzy, but the very appearance of Reagan at the fair already spoke volumes. A short walk from where he stood lay the spot where the bodies of three civil rights activists were found 16 years earlier.
If Neshoba was unknown to many at the time, the name Philadelphia, Mississippi was familiar worldwide. The town was the county seat of Neshoba.
Michael Schwerner, a white New Yorker, had been organizing Black voters as a field worker in the area for the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) for all of 1964. The Mississippi KKK sent word that the young man they cleverly nicknamed “Jewboy” was to be eliminated. Klansman showed up at the Methodist Church that was operating as a Freedom School in Neshoba County looking for Schwerner. When they learned he was in Ohio for a training they beat church members and burned the church to the ground.
Schwerner returned from the CORE training with a new recruit, Andrew Goodman, 20, and a local black activist James Chaney, 21. The three went to inspect the church.
Afterwards, driving through Philadelphia they were pulled over by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price on a trumped up charge of speeding. We know they weren’t going 75mph in a 35mph zone as was claimed because their tire blew out as they entered town limits — possibly punctured by the officer lying in wait.
The three were held in the county jail for seven hours and told they were arson suspects in the church fire. They were suddenly released and allowed to drive away. Price and a KKK mob followed. They beat Chaney then shot the men and buried them not far from where Reagan spoke.
MIBURN
Deputy Sheriff Price was a proud KKK member, and not long before the murders the Neshoba County Sheriff who hired Price was celebrated at a Klan rally. He surveyed the Klansman and said they were, “Fine people and a mighty good organization.”
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was outraged by the brazen attitude of local law enforcement and pressured FBI Director Hoover to direct massive resources to the case.
Hoover personally opened the FBI’s first field office in Mississippi and sent 200 agents and even more federal troops to search for the three men.
The operation was dubbed MIBURN — Mississippi Burning.
No arrests were made and no charges brought by the state of Mississippi even after the bodies were found and the conspiracy was uncovered. The U.S. Justice Department brought charges against 19 men for violating the victims’ civil rights. Seven were convicted but none spent more than six years in prison.
The segregationist federal judge who presided explained the light sentences:
They killed one n****r, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them what I thought they deserved.
When Reagan mentioned the “federal establishment” in Neshoba he wasn’t just talking about tax policy. He was invoking the spectre of pro-integration federal policy, meddling FBI agents, even Union troops. He was using barely coded language to say, “I’m with you.” Some of the men involved in the killings were very likely in the crowd that day.
Pete Seeger Those three are on my mind
Justice
Justice would come for one of the killers, but not until 2005. The State of Mississippi finally brought charges against Edgar Ray Killen. The Attorney General was forced to act under public pressure after an investigative journalist, a high school teacher and three students discovered new evidence as they worked on a history project.
Killen, understandably thinking the killers were untouchable, granted an interview to the teacher who recorded it. The students and teacher uncovered facts that helped solve mysteries that plagued investigators for decades — including the identity of the anonymous caller who led authorities to the bodies of the men. The 80-year-old Killen was not found guilty of three counts of murder, but was convicted of manslaughter.
Peanuts
Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 that outlawed segregated schools. The backlash was swift in the South and community leaders visited a peanut farmer at his warehouse in Plains, Georgia. They invited him to join the White Citizens’ Council. He declined. They returned again a few days later and said he was the only person in Plains who had not joined. He still refused. Finally, they recruited his customers and came again demanding he join or risk losing their business. They explained he only needed to pay the $5 membership fee and they would give it to him if he didn’t have the money.
He replied:
I’ve got $5. And I’d flush it down the toilet before I’d give it to you!
Even with his strong anti-racist views, Democrat Jimmy Carter swept the Deep South in 1976 — so strong was the “yellow dog” impulse and pride in a southern native son.
But the Peanut Farmer also devoted his campaign to turning out newly enfranchised Black voters. Carter was the face of the New South, gracing the cover of Time Magazine after he stated in his 1970 gubernatorial inaugural address:
I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.
He defeated George Wallace for the 1976 presidential nomination and invited Barbara Jordan, the first female Black member of Congress from the South since Reconstruction to give the keynote address at the convention. Andrew Young, also a new Black representative from the South officially nominated Carter. Martin Luther King, Sr. gave the closing benediction.
The Carter campaign utilized the Voting Rights Act to turn out Black voters in the South. His candidacy helped bring nearly half of the Black population to the polls in 1976.
The survey results strongly suggest that the President (Ford) and Mr. Carter would run about even among white voters, with, Mr. Ford possibly edging out the former Governor by a slim margin. However, when blacks are added, Mr. Carter would win by about 6 percentage points.
– Poll Shows Blacks Decisive for Carter In Lead Over Ford , New York Times, June 2, 1976
Carter won by 2 points but secured Electoral College victory thanks to his dominating performance in the South.
Atwater
Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips articulated what came to be known as the ‘Southern Strategy’ to the New York Times in 1970:
The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Lee Atwater was an acolyte and brought this strategy to his work with Reagan’s campaign. The South handed Carter the presidency. Flipping the region would take it away from him.
We know Atwater’s thinking because he laid it out meticulously in a strategy memoshortly after Republicans suffered midterm defeats in 1982. Worried that the 1980 margin was too thin, Atwater redoubled efforts to bring southern whites to the GOP in 1984.
He broke voters in the region into three categories:
- The Country Clubbers
- The Pouplists
- The Blacks.
Atwater characterized ‘The Populists’ as middle and lower class whites who seldom voted and are conservative on social issues. Atwater made his point clear: “George Wallace is a reflection of the populists.” They are white supremacists.
By Atwater’s calculations, the populists swung the South to either party — aligning with Black voters as yellow dog Democrats or with the wealthy GOP base if their race-based prejudices were stoked.
If you are thinking Atwater was uninterested in attracting Black voters, you should know that after pages and pages on turning out populists he devoted three whole points in his memo to courting Black folks. One of them reads: The Need for More Study: There is plenty of research left to be done!
With tables and graphs Atwater described how a higher Black population and more Black voters meant stronger turnout by fearful, racist whites. This is why Reagan found himself giving his first post-convention speech at the Neshoba County Fair.
And it worked.
Here is Carter’s 1976 map, a solidly blue South only broken by Virginia:
And here are the fruits of Atwater’s strategy:
Carter actually increased the Black vote in 1980 and retained his domineering 83% support amongst them, but Reagan tore into his white support.
Carter only held onto his home state of Georgia. While the map looks unequivocal Reagan barely won the Deep South with margins of victory within 2.1% and just .2% in Mississippi. He gained 1,200 of his needed votes in Neshoba County alone.
By 1984, the South would be lost with Reagan ushering in a wave Republican Senators, Representatives, Governors and even local judges.
Southerner Bill Clinton was able to sneak in a few southern states with the help of Black voters while simultaneously courting Atwater’s populists with his own dog whistles. He repeated the “Welfare Queen” trope Ronald Reagan had popularized in the 1970s. But for the most part, the South was lost for the Democrats. Al Gore couldn’t even carry his home state of Tennessee, costing him the election in 2000.
Political hegemony for a generation is a matter of minor slippages. The difference between minority and majority is only a few percentage points.
Legacy
The Gipper has emerged as a deity for the GOP. Trump Republicans invoke his legacy and Never Trumpers claim their desire to return the party to the Reagan glory days. ‘Reagan Republican’ is shorthand for a fiscal conservative and social liberal.
Though he privately opposed celebrating MLK, most historians do not see Reagan as an openly racist president. Whether he believed what he was saying and doing in his heart, or thought it was the most expedient path to victory matters little. Ultimately, his policies had the effect of increasing racial inequality and defending white supremacy.
Reagan did hold the libertarian view that government should not intervene even to redress racial imbalance. His Justice Department set out to tear down rather than uphold integration, affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. He elevated William Rehnquist to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Rehnquist once defended segregation arguing:
It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white people of the South do not like the colored people
John Roberts clerked for Rehnquist and authored memos at the Justice Department arguing for a weakened civil rights enforcement on voting. Roberts would cast the decisive vote in the 5-4 decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Every Justice who sided with Roberts was either appointed by Ronald Reagan or worked in his administration.
Tribes
Reagan may have won even without his campaigning in Neshoba County, but he chose to go and make an openly racist appeal while trampling on the memory of civil rights martyrs.
Joshua Greene, a professor of psychology at Harvard explains how exclusion of one group is a path to inclusion by another in relation to Trump’s outrageous and openly racist statements.
Making oneself irredeemably unacceptable to the other tribe is equivalent to permanently binding oneself to one’s own. These comments are like gang tattoos. And in Trump’s case, it’s tattoos all over his neck and face.
Think of it in sports terms. If you tell me you like the Portland Trail Blazers I might invite you to watch a game, but if you say “I hate the Los Angeles Lakers” we are friends for life.
Donald Trump did not invent outrageous words and behavior to signal fealty to white racist voters. He built on the foundation Ronald Reagan laid 40 years ago at the Neshoba County Fair.
Beyond the Margins
How Jimmy Carter championed civil rights and Ronald Reagan didn’t | LA Times
Dixie’s Long Journey from Democratic Stronghold to Republican Redoubt | NPR
Slain civil rights workers found | History.com
Inside John Roberts’ Decades-Long Crusade Against the Voting Rights Act | POLITICO Magazine
Posted on August 28, 2020 #History #Politics #Race