Legacy Worth Remembering ( more Reagan

Legacy Worth Remembering By Joe Davidson, BET.com Political Columnist


What do you think of Reagan’s legacy?

Posted June 6, 2004 -- It’s customary to say good things about the dead.



Ronald Reagan appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court. He signed legislation for a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King. He thawed relations with the Soviet Union and signed a nuclear weapons treaty. He was warm and amiable and had a good sense of humor. He liked horses.
Now let's talk about what he did to Black people.

After taking office in 1981, Reagan began a sustained attack on the government’s civil rights apparatus, opened an assault on affirmative action and social welfare programs, embraced the White racist leaders of then-apartheid South Africa and waged war on a tiny, Black Caribbean nation.



Derrick Medlock, 49 of
New York, N.Y., comments on the effects of the Reagan years.


So thorough was Reagan’s attack on programs of importance to African Americans, that the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, an organization formed in the wake of Reagan’s attempt to neuter the official U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said he caused "an across-the-board breakdown in the machinery constructed by six previous administrations to protect civil rights."

During his two terms in office, Reagan captured, solidified and came to personify America’s move to the political right. His greatest legacy is as leader of that swing in the American political spectrum. That shift made “liberal” a dirty word and Democrats cower. What had been conservative became moderate. What was moderate was pushed to the left wing. The shift was so pronounced and profound that Black America giddily embraced Bill Clinton despite his promotion of programs, criminal justice and welfare policies in particular, that would have been called racist and reactionary under Reagan.

"Ronald Regan, it is fair to say, was really an anathema to the entire civil rights community and the civil rights agenda,” Ronald W. Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, told BET.com just a few hours after Reagan died, at age 93, on Saturday.

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