"A long-overdue and sober examination of President Ronald Reagan's racist politics that continue to harm communities today and helped shape the modern conservative movement.
2021 Prose Award Finalist
A long-overdue and sober examination of President Ronald Reagan's racist politics that continue to harm communities today and helped shape the modern conservative movement.
Ronald Reagan is hailed as a transformative president and an American icon, but within his twentieth-century politics lies a racial legacy that is rarely discussed. Both political parties point to Reagan as the ""right"" kind of conservative but fail to acknowledge his political attacks on people of color prior to and during his presidency. Reconsidering Reagan corrects that narrative and reveals how his views, policies, and actions were devastating for Black Americans and racial minorities, and that the effects continue to resonate today.
Using research from previously untapped resources including the Black press which critically covered Reagan's entire political career, Daniel S. Lucks traces Reagan's gradual embrace of conservatism, his opposition to landmark civil rights legislation, his coziness with segregationists, and his skill in tapping into white anxiety about race, riding a wave of ""white backlash"" all the way to the Presidency. He argues that Reagan has the worst civil rights record of any President since the 1920s-including supporting South African apartheid, packing courts with conservatives, targeting laws prohibiting discrimination in education and housing, and launching the ""War on Drugs""-which had cataclysmic consequences on the lives of Black and Brown people.
Linking the past to the present, Lucks expertly examines how Reagan set the blueprint for President Trump and proves that he is not an anomaly, but in fact the logical successor to bring back the racially tumultuous America that Reagan conceptualized."
By:
Daniel Lucks
Imprint: Beacon Press
Country of Publication: United States
Weight: 567g
ISBN: 9780807029572
ISBN 10: 0807029572
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 23 June 2020
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction PART I: UP FROM RACIAL LIBERALISM CHAPTER 1 Early Reagan: The Unmaking of a Racial Liberal CHAPTER 2 On the Wrong Side of History: States’ Rights vs. Human Rights PART II: RIDING THE WAVE OF THE WHITE BACKLASH (1966–1980) CHAPTER 3 Reagan’s First Campaign: Riots, the Rumford Act, and Backlash Politics CHAPTER 4 Reagan’s 1968 Race for the Presidency: “Law and Order” and the Southern Strategy CHAPTER 5 The Perfect Targets: Black Radicals and Welfare Moochers CHAPTER 6 Reagan’s Near Miss in 1976: Welfare Queens, Jesse Helms, and George Wallace Voters CHAPTER 7 Let’s Make America Great Again: Reagan’s 1980 Triumph PART III: PRESIDENT REAGAN: ROLLING BACK THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION (1981–1989) CHAPTER 8 Launching a Counterrevolution in Civil Rights CHAPTER 9 Controlling the Civil Rights Commission and Igniting Old Conservative Battles CHAPTER 10 South Africa: Reagan’s Embrace of the Apartheid Government and the Fight for Sanctions CHAPTER 11 The Battle for the Judiciary CHAPTER 12 The War on Drugs, Willie Horton, and the Criminalization of Blackness CONCLUSION Reagan’s Racial Legacy and the Road to Trump Acknowledgments Notes Index
Daniel S. Lucks holds a PhD in American history from the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of Selma to Saigon- The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. He is a graduate of the University of California Hastings College of the Law and lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews for Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump
Throughout his political career, Ronald Reagan was on the wrong side of almost every civil rights question. Too many accounts of his life have downplayed or ignored his shameful record on civil and human rights. In this powerful and persuasive book, Daniel Lucks shines an honest, uncompromising light on Reagan's disgraceful legacy and draws a straight line from Reagan to Donald Trump. --Robert Mann, author of Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon
