(ThyBlackMan.com) In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s campaign for the presidency kicked off inside a quagmire where three brutal murders took place. Needless to say, it was a very strange choice for a candidate to begin his campaign to become president, because these weren’t normal murders. Rather, they were a trio of modern day lynchings, a horror that failed to die with the past. There is no question that Reagan knew about the lynchings, so the choice is even more conspicuous. From a modern perspective, this was Reagan’s attempt to let southern bigots like George Wallace know that he was “a good ole boy like them”, a throwback to the “Southern Strategy” mentality Republican strategist pretend to rebut.
Earlier that year, Jewish American Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband Robert and their son David said goodbye to Andrew, their 
20 year old son. Andrew was on his way to Mississippi, where he was determined to inspire local blacks to register and vote in the forthcoming presidential elections. It was a time when racism was raging at its highest levels as a backlash to the success for Blacks via the Civil Rights Act of the 1960’s.
His family repeatedly warned Andrew about going on this mission; being a white civil rights activist was deadly enough, but travelling to the center of the South to fight for racial equality with blacks was suicide. However, given the Goodman family’s devotion to equality and civil rights commitments, they could hardly dissuade a determined Andrew.
Shortly after arriving, Andrew visited Neshoba County, Mississippi. The region was a vicious white-supremacist stronghold, and the scorched walls of the black church, where the Ku Klux Klan had bombed and beaten black worshippers, stood as a stark warning.
Positioned in the county, Andrew, together with his fellow activists, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, were aggressively attacked and deterred, but the spirit of equality fueled them on. After one day, they all disappeared without a trace. In August, their bodies were discovered, shot and lynched as a gruesome reminder of the Southern reality.
The murder of these 3 activists became known as one of the most inhumane killings in American history. When Ronald Reagan won the Republican Party nomination for president in 1980, the Neshoba County’s Primary flames were reignited. The overt racism would increase in America during Reagan’s presidency.
Reagan concentrated on Neshoba County Fair during his campaign to secure the white supremacy vote. Thousands of his supporters came out in large numbers to support him. He captured history as the first presidential candidate to appear there and he was very confident and vocal to convince his white audience that he believed in “states’ rights”, a poor symbolic attempt at covering blatant racism.
Reagan’s move to attend the fair was hardly goodwill; instead, it was a not so subtle message to his supporters that he would keep white supremacy in place. As a presidential candidate, he couldn’t appear to be an overt racist. However, his actions were written clearly in covert symbolism to the dregs of White America- Reagan would keep racism alive.
President Reagan was known to spearhead the recognition and respect of states’ rights during his campaigns. His debut in the Neshoba County Fair, by default, stressed a volatile relationship between blacks and whites in the south during the era of Bull Connor, an avid segregationist. Reagan’s administration was strongly against the Landmark Civil Right Act of 1964, a bill fought on behalf of by activists for decades. Ronald Reagan, a darling of the right, was no friend of the Civil Rights movement.
His quest to fight against civil rights issues became aerated when he vetoed a bill in 1988 that focused on increasing the federal oversight via civil rights legislation. Thankfully, Congress decided to override the veto together. His political ambitions were characterized by insensitive, mean-spirited perspectives on civil-rights issues, clearly an affront to the civil rights movement in general and black people specifically.
Ronald Reagan’s favorite thing to defend was not the dignity of the American people, but “states’ rights”, an obvious coded reference to racism. Surely, the Emancipation Proclamation and Civil Rights Act all infringed on state’s rights, so these essential legal protections were effectively null in his rhetoric. It can be argued that Ronald Reagan was much less racist than many of his predecessors, such as Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson; to name a few. However, what made his racism insidious was the subtlety of it; instead of lynching black Americans himself, he provided, through symbolism, metaphorical pitchforks and rope to angry crowds that he created, much like the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz during the present 2016 election cycle.
Does history repeat itself? Many conservative Republicans today fervently deny that they are racist, and yet Reagan is venerated as the patron saint of their party. They don’t hate blacks; they just don’t want to appear too liberal minded. They aren’t saying that all blacks are thugs, or all Mexicans are rapists, or that all Muslims are terrorists; it just happens to be something worthy of mentioning, because of course whites don’t commit crimes, other races do. Listening to the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump, and to that extent Ted Cruz, it is only a matter of time before the next Goodman murder, or “random accident” as Republicans refer to it: “stuff happens”. The culture of symbolic racism being perpetrated by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump isn’t only morally wrong, but also fundamentally dangerous, both to the livelihood of minorities and to the spirit of unity that stands as the backbone of the American Dream.
Staff Writer; Stanley G. Buford
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