Flashback: Reagan makes King holiday official

Flashback: Reagan makes King holiday official

President Ronald Reagan signs legislation creating the Martin Luther King
Jr. federal holiday as Coretta Scott King, the civil-right's leader's widow,
watches, Nov. 2, 1983. Reagan Presidential Library.

by Frank James

Given the New Hampshire comments by Sen. Hillary Clinton about it taking a president to make dreams a legislative reality, for which she was excoriated by some of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters, and Obama's Nevada comments about Reagan being a transformational president, for which he was castigated by Sen. Clinton, her husband former President Bill Clinton and others, this seemed like an appropriate photo to run today.

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John McCain Refuses to Fire South Carolina Spokesman Who Founded A Confederate Heritage Magazine And Wrote Against MLK Holiday. Quinn was the editor in chief of The Southern Partisan magazine, which was described by Vanity Fair as "rabidly devoted to the South's Confederate heritage." In a 1983 column arguing against the recognition of Martin Luther King Day, Quinn wrote, "King Day should have been rejected because its purpose is vitriolic and profane." As recently as December 23, 2005, Richard Quinn was identified as "McCain's South Carolina spokesman." A 2004 Vanity Fair piece on McCain's fall in the 2000 campaign identified Quinn as "the McCain (2000) campaign's South Carolina strategist." (The State, 2/9/01, Partisan View, Southern Partisan, Fall, 1983, Spartanburg Herald-Journal, 12/23/05; Vanity Fair, 11/04)

Supported 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

Promised to appoint a female Justice; O’Connor was the first
Reagan changed the Supreme Court. He appointed the first woman to the high court, Sandra Day O’Connor, fulfilling a pledge he had made during a low point of his 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan’s strategists came up with the idea of putting a woman on the Supreme Court.
Source: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, p. 804 Jul 2, 1991

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

Supports constitutional amendment to allow prayer in schools
When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they never intended to construct a wall between government and religious belief. The Supreme Court opens its proceedings with a religious invocation. Congress opens sessions with a prayer. I believe the schoolchildren of the United States are entitled to the same privileges. I sent the Congress a constitutional amendment to restore prayer to public schools. I am calling on the Congress to act speedily and to let our children pray.
Source: Speech in Orlando Florida Mar 8, 1983

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On August 2, 1983, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill creating a legal public holiday in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although there had been little discussion of the bill in the House itself and little awareness among the American public that Congress was even considering such a bill, it was immediately clear that the U.S. Senate sould take up the legislation soon after the Labor Day recess.

The House had passed the King Holiday Bill by an overwhelming vote of 338-90, with significant bipartisan support (both Reps. Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich voted for it), and the Reagan administration was indicating that the president would not veto it if it came before him. In these circumstances, most political observers seemed to think that Senate enactment and presidential signature of the bill would take place virtually unopposed; few anticipated that the battle over the King holiday in the next few weeks would be one of the most bitter congressional and public controversies of the decade.

From 1981 to 1986 I worked on the staff of North Carolina Republican Sen. John P. East, a close associate and political ally of the senior senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms. While the legislation was being considered I wrote a paper entitled "Martin Luther King, Jr.: Political Activities and Associations." It was simply documentation of the affiliations with various individuals and organizations of communist background that King had maintained since the days when he first became a nationally prominent figure.

In September, the paper was distributed to several Senate offices for the purpose of informing them of these facts about King, facts in which the national news media showed no interest. It was not originally my intention that the paper be read on the floor of the Senate, but the Helms office itself expressed an interest in using it as a speech, and it was read in the Congressional Record on October 3, 1983. During ensuing debate over the King holiday, I acted as a consultant to Sen. Helms and his regular staff.

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Meanwhile, Sen. Helms, with legal assistance from the Conservative Caucus, filed suit in federal court to obtain the release of FBI surveillance tapes on King that had been sealed by court order until the year 2027. Their argument was that senators could not fairly evaluate King's character and beliefs anc ast an informed vote on the holiday measure until they had gained access to this sealed material and had an opportunity to examine it. The Reagan Justice Department opposed this action, and on October 18, U.S. District Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr. refused to release the King files, which remain selaed to this day.

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