ANALYSIS: ‘Reagan’ movie misses late president’s bumpy relationship with Black America

ARLINGTON, Virginia – “Reagan,” the movie starring Dennis Quaid as the 40^th U.S. president and Jon Voight as a Russian Reagan analyst, opened here at the start of the Labor Day weekend. The 100-seat theater was nearly full. 

When the two-hour, 15-minute biopic ended, some people applauded. At least a dozen of them hung around afterward to chat. Reagan was one of the most consequential commanders-in-chief of the United States’ nearly quarter-of-a millennium history, whether citizens adored or despised him.

Conspicuously missing from the celebratory Hollywood-style movie, except for one anecdote from Reagan’s youth, was his combative and complicated relationship with Black America. More about that very soon.

Reagan was the torchbearer of the 1980s conservative revolution. He loathed big government, unions, socialism, and most of all, communism. When Reagan took office 43 years ago, America and its Western allies were locked in a Cold War with the then Soviet Union — Russia and its Eastern European communist satellite nations. 

About half of “Reagan” covers the man’s origin story. The rest involves the United States and its Western allies’ nuclear weapons brinkmanship with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Hollywood treatment provides this narrative: Reagan and his advisers discover Russia has stockpiled more nuclear missiles than the United States. Reagan then labels the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” and vows that America will build a “Star Wars”-like bubble shield to protect itself from nuclear destruction. 

When Reagan was shot and wounded on March 30, 1981, there were whispers that the Russians were to blame, according to the movie. If true, that would have been an act of war. 

Meanwhile, the first Polish pope, John Paul II, was shot and wounded in May 1981 in St. Peter’s Square, Rome, and the next year, the Turkish assailant alleged he conspired with Bulgarian intelligence acting on behalf of Russia’s KGB spies. The pope was a staunch anti-communist. 

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev engaged in nuclear arms reduction talks with Reagan. In 1987 while in Berlin the president bellowed, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” By 1989, the nearly 26-year-old concrete wall dividing the democratic West and the communist East had come down. Soon, a united Germany became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and an adversary to Russia.

That triumph was Reagan’s overarching legacy. The demolition of the Soviet empire today motivates a revenge-minded Vladimir Putin.

Now, what about Black folk and the parts that did not make it into the film? 

Leah Wright Rigueur, author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” wrote that in 1980, “No one, least of all Black Republicans, could have predicted the fundamental way that Ronald Reagan’s victory would alter the American political landscape; nor could they have anticipated the way in which some of their ideas – a nuanced and often conflicting set of beliefs articulated over 44 years – would suddenly gain a widespread traction in both the mainstream GOP and broader American political culture.”

Members of the National Negro Republican Assembly, Rigueur continued, viewed former California Gov. Reagan with suspicion because of his unequivocal rejection of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and his statement that he “would not have voted for the civil rights bill.”

While running for president, unsuccessfully in 1976 and successfully in 1980, Reagan alleged there were Black “welfare queens” gaming the federal safety net and living large. The accusation, except for one scamming Chicago woman of ambiguous ethnicity, was fiction. 

In 1980, Reagan campaigned in Philadelphia, Mississippi, ignoring the racially sensitive history of the location where racists in 1964 murdered civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. 

When Reagan signed the bill in 1983 making the birthday of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a federal holiday, he flippantly quipped that MLK may have consorted with communists. 

And internationally, as South Africa’s apartheid system of legalized racial discrimination became widely known and condemned, Reagan’s policy was “constructive engagement” with the White minority’s metaphorical knee on the neck of the Black majority. 

Reagan in turn was checked by college students who pressured their schools to divest of South African mineral wealth, and the Congress – notably Congressional Black Caucus members – who in 1986 overrode the president’s veto of sanctions against South Africa. 

One interesting note — “Reagan” introduces the general public to William Franklin “Burgie” Burghardt, young Reagan’s Eureka College Black student-athlete and football teammate, and a relative of late Black scholar W.E.B. DuBois. When a hotel in the 1930s refused accommodations to Burghardt because of his color, Reagan invited him to stay at his Illinois home, according to news accounts. 

The movie’s buddy anecdote runs counter to Reagan’s record with Black people as a group or as individuals.

Indeed, there were policy and ideological fights with Reagan four decades ago, yet would the conservative icon be acceptable to the 2024 GOP? Reagan won bruising battles, but he had policy defeats too, and he sometimes compromised with Democrats and liberals on challenges [i.e. the AIDS crisis] affecting many Americans. 

Reagan wanted to reduce the government footprint, but never suggested destroying U.S. institutions, as has the 45^th president now seeking re-election. As for the criticism of the Joe Biden administration that it engaged America in too many wars – two or three, in Reagan’s time, there were 40-plus wars being waged globally with the U.S. and Russia bankrolling long lists of surrogate fighter nations.

“Reagan” does an excellent job of tying a handful of events together that could have ignited World War III because of human miscalculations, or worse, nuclear missile global destruction. The film does a less than excellent job of broadly portraying his complicated relationship with Black America.

No joke: in 2006, my Hampton University seniors in a news editing class laughed at me when I uttered “Evil Empire,” “Soviet Union” and fear of getting “nuked” to answer one of their questions about Russia’s poisoning of a defector. 

Those students did not believe the world I experienced as a 30ish adult existed. 

Yet dramatic 1980s events I witnessed are clues to assess Ronald Reagan’s story.

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