PRESIDENT Bush proclaimed: "Ronald Reagan believed that God takes the side of justice and that America has a special calling to oppose tyranny and defend freedom." In the first three days of news reports on the death of the former president, not a single major American newspaper, television station, or politician has dared to exhume this counterpoint to the Reagan's legacy: "Immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian."
These were the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, spoken on Capitol Hill at a House hearing in late 1984. It was just after Reagan's easy reelection. Tutu had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Throughout the United States a rising number of Americans were calling for American companies to stop doing business there.
Reagan ignored them. The president of so-called sunny optimism attempted to blind Americans with his policy of "constructive engagement" with the white minority regime in Pretoria. All constructive engagment did was give the white minority more time to mow down the black majority in the streets and keep dreamers of democracy, such as Nelson Mandela, behind bars.
In the weeks leading up to his appearance on Capitol Hill, Tutu said in speeches that it seemed that the Reagan White House saw "blacks as expendable" in South Africa. The white government forced black people from prized lands and into horrid townships. Migratory labor laws split familes for 11 months at a time. Education was gutted for black children. There was virtually no due process for black defendants. Tutu said it was "reminiscent of Hitler's Aryan madness." Tutu declared that "constructive engagement is an abomination, an unmitigated disaster."
On Capitol Hill, Tutu became a public relations disaster for Reagan. Tutu started off the hearing by saying apartheid itself "is evil, is immoral, is un-Christian, without remainder." I was there, and all breathing stopped, without remainder. Tutu continued:
"In my view, the Reagan administration's support and collaboration with it is equally immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian. . . . You are either for or against apartheid and not by rhetoric. You are either in favor of evil or you are in favor of good. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral."
Tutu received an unprecedented standing ovation by the committee. Even Reagan's Republican allies told the South African Embassy they would reluctantly support sanctions if Pretoria did not move to end apartheid.
Reagan was not moved. Over the remainder of his presidency, at least 3,000 people would die, mostly at the hands of the South African police and military. Another 20,000, including 6,000 children, according to one estimate by a human rights group, would be arrested under "state of emergency" decrees.
Yet Reagan had the gall to say in 1985 that the "reformist administration" of South Africa had "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country." In 1986, Reagan gave a speech where he said Mandela should be released but denounced sanctions with crocodile tears, claiming that they would hurt black workers, who were already ridiculously impoverished. Reagan's go-slow speech was denounced by Tutu, who said: "I found it quite nauseating. I think the West, for my part, can go to hell. . . . Your president is the pits as far as blacks are concerned. He sits there like the great, big white chief of old."
Later in 1986, Reagan made his greatest demonstration yet that black bodies were "expendable." Congress had finally had enough of the carnage to vote for limited sanctions. Reagan vetoed them. Congress overrode the veto. Reagan proceded to put no muscle behind the sanctions. Mandela remained in jail and at least 2,000 political prisoners remained detained without trial.
In 1987 Reagan published a report that said additional sanctions "would not be helpful." The gleeful South African foreign minister, Roelof Botha, said that Reagan "and his administration have an understanding of the reality of South Africa."
Reagan's and Botha's "reality" was rendered a fantasy by the force of world opinion and a more enlightened leadership inside South Africa. Only a year after Reagan left office, Mandela was released. One can only wonder how much sooner he would have been released and how many lives would have been saved had Reagan not behaved like the white chief of old.
President Bush said Reagan believed God was on the side of justice. On South Africa, Reagan was on the side of one of the most demonic governments on the face of the earth. He chose to assist tyranny and ignore brutality. Ronald Reagan's death has been followed by relentless descriptions of him as a president of sunny optimism. On South Africa he was no sunshine. He was the cloud who dimmed the skies as apartheid rained death upon black people.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
THE HEADLINES of The Boston Globe and Time magazine called Ronald Reagan an "All-American." Dan Rather led the CBS News by saying, "Ronald Reagan, the Cold War crusader whose sunny optimism made a nation believe it was morning in America, dies at 93." The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Reagan's relentless optimism projected the sun."
That is from the so-called liberal media. Liberal politicians also suffered sunstroke. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy praised Reagan's "extraordinary ability to inspire the nation to live up to its high ideals." Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Even when he was breaking Democrats hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate." Kerry added, "He was our oldest president, but he made America young again."
The praise proved one of the oldest of scientific lessons. If you stare too much into the sun, you go blind.
Calling Reagan an "all-American" insults the millions of Americans whom he deprived of his sunlight. Reagan far too often invited the nation to live down to its lowest common denominators. Reagan tried to make America younger, all right. He tried to return us to the days where we sat before black-and-white televisions, in separate black and white neighborhoods, where white people saw only white people and black people were represented by Buckwheat and the only time you saw lots of people of color were dead Indians in Westerns.
The Los Angeles Times said Reagan's "optimism was catching." Tell that to black folks, the poor, unions, people with AIDS, environmentalists, college students needing aid, Holocaust survivors, and pro-choice activists. They all caught hell. You could hardly call the Iran-Contra arms scandal an "honest and open debate."
"The Great Communicator" knew exactly where to project the sun for particular white people. His first major speech after receiving the nomination for president in 1980 was delivered at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. Neshoba County was where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964. The county fair was legendary for segregationist speeches and Dixie ditties.
The fair was a more comfortable fit for Reagan than the mainstream press has ever admitted. On his way to California's governorship, he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At the fair, Reagan declared, "I believe in states' rights." States' rights was the cry of Southern segregationists.
Reagan did not mention Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. He did effusively praise John Wayne, saying: "God rest his soul. I don't know whether John Wayne had this experience or not, but I wish he had, because I don't know of anyone who would have loved it more or been more at home here than the Duke would have been, right here."
Wayne would have been so at home at the fair because he, like Reagan, represented a "younger" America. In a 1971 Playboy interview, Wayne said: "We can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership to irresponsible people." Wayne was also asked his opinion of Indians after wasting so many of them in the movies. He said: "I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country from them, if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival."
Morning in America became nightfall for civil rights. Once in office, Reagan accelerated the systematic erosion of affirmative action. He made William Rehnquist chief justice of the Supreme Court even though Rehnquist opposed integration in the 1960s. He chose an Interior secretary, James Watt, who bragged that he had appointed to an advisory group "a black . . . a woman, two Jews, and a cripple." Reagan wanted to cut the school lunch program, calling ketchup a vegetable, and spun lies about "welfare queens."
Reagan was silent for years on AIDS. He tried to get tax exemptions for racist Bob Jones University. He originally opposed the Martin Luther King holiday before signing it into law. He did veto an extension of the Civil Rights Act in 1988 and defanged the US Civil Rights Commission. He exchanged schools for the prison boom. Reagan's legacy is still alive. The senior President Bush vetoed a major civil rights bill in 1990 and vetoed an increase in the minimum wage. President Clinton slashed welfare. The junior President Bush campaigned at Bob Jones and sided with the white students who wanted to destroy affirmative action at the University of Michigan.
That is not an "All-American" legacy. Reagan projected the sun to mask a scowl. His presidency is indeed extraordinary. It is extraordinary for how easily Americans hail his "optimism." For African-Americans, and all Americans who were targets of his policies, it was open season.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.