Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., lied at this weekend’s South by Southwest Conference and Festivals when she implied that former President Reagan was a racist. Her claim that Reagan”pitted” white working class people against minorities in order “to screw over all working-class Americans,” particularly African-Americans and Hispanics, is both false and malicious. He did no such thing.
Had Ocasio-Cortez bothered to do her homework, she would have found otherwise.
As governor of California, Reagan appointed more African-Americans to government positions than any previous chief executive of the state. In the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan was endorsed by civil rights leaders Ralph Abernathy, Charles Evers, and Hosea Williams.
It was Reagan who signed the bill that made the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday. Here’s part of what he said at the signing ceremony:
President Reagan appointed the first African-American, Colin Powell, to be national security adviser, and the first Hispanic, Lauro Cavazos, to a cabinet position as the secretary of education.
In 1980, then-candidate Reagan received over 43 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Reagan supported statehood for Puerto Rico.
As for one most common story used to tar Reagan as a racist, the corruption of Linda Taylor — the Chicago “welfare queen” to whom Reagan referred in speeches — was documented in both the The Washington Post and The New York Times. He had not made this up.
The Reagan administration created more than 18 million jobs and kicked off a 26-year run of economic growth. Far from being a divisive force, Reagan left office with the support of 70 percent of the American people at large and 41 percent of African-Americans specifically. His was the most unifying president since John F. Kennedy.
Reagan supported enterprise zones as a means of bringing more prosperity to the inner city, but was blocked for eight years by Speakers Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., and Jim Wright, D-Texas.
Reagan has been accused of many things, but no one who knew or studied him ever suggested he was a racist. He never judged anyone on the basis of skin color because he was raised to treat everyone the same. His father, Jack, refused to allow his son to see “The Birth of a Nation” because of its racist content, even though it was one of Woodrow Wilson’s favorite movies. Reagan carried that feeling of equality in his heart for his entire life.
It is well known that while in college, on a football team road trip in 1931, Reagan’s team stayed at a hotel that did not allow African-Americans. So Reagan took two of his fellow players, who happened to be African-American, to his nearby home, where they spent the night with his family instead.
Ocasio-Cortez is entitled to advocate for whatever positions she wishes, no matter how antithetical they may be to American values and our way of life. That is the beauty of our system. But she is not entitled to lie; no one in public office is. She owes Ronald Reagan and the public an apology.
Craig Shirley is the author of four bestsellers on former President Reagan and is the Visiting Reagan Scholar at Eureka College. Mark Weinberg, a longtime aide to President Reagan both during and after his presidency, is the author of Movie Nights with the Reagans.
