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JBHE continues its series on the racial views of U.S. presidents. Ronald Reagan always said that he didn't have a racist bone in his body. Yet his campaign strategies and governmental policies consistently pandered to the racial prejudices of white voters.
In past issues of JBHE we have examined the racial attitudes of a number of presidents of the United States. In almost all cases, the story is the same. From time to time the rules have changed in the prevailing etiquette as to what a national leader was permitted to say publicly. But until recent years almost all presidents of the United States have believed in, and openly expressed views of, the essential inferiority of black people.
Let's go back to the beginning. Although the Founding Fathers had differing views of the ethics of slavery, they never believed that Negroes were equal to whites in intelligence or character. George Washington, America's favorite son, was pious and a just man. He also owned hundreds of slaves. In a letter to a friend, Washington complained, "When an overlooker's back is turned, the most of them will slight their work, or be idle altogether." Thomas Jefferson, also a slaveowner, complained of the foul odor of black people. Jefferson wrote that blacks "in memory are equal to whites; in reason much inferior; in imagination, dull, tasteless and anomalous."
In the course of the 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln said, "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."
The post-Civil War Reconstruction period produced a nation that was virulently racist. Reflecting prevailing attitudes at the turn of the century, President Theodore Roosevelt remarked, "This perfectly stupid race can never rise. The Negro has been kept down as much by a lack of intellectual development as by anything else."
President Woodrow Wilson held the most intensely racist views of any American president of the twentieth century. He was fond of telling "darkey stories" in dialect at cabinet meetings. Earlier, as...