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The 1980 Neshoba County Fair in context Sunday, Jul 2, 2006 By David Sanders Days following the 1980 Republican Convention in Detroit, Ronald Reagan visited Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., in an appearance that touched off a flurry of criticism. Lou Cannon reported on the speech for the Washington Post: "Reagan said he believed he would do everything he could to reorder priorities to 'restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.'" The murder of three civil rights workers by segregationist whites in 1964 provided the linkage some needed to label Reagan a "race baiter" following his speech. "I was really an advocate for the visit and really wanted him to do it," Lanny Griffith said in a personal interview for another project. "My view at the time was that we needed to win (Mississippi) and for what Reagan needed to do, there was no better place he could go." Griffith is one of Washington's top lobbyists, but then he was the young executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party who now admits to being "partly responsible" for the one major event in the 1980 campaign that fueled a firestorm about race. It was critical for Reagan to break into the South and win over the voters that Carter had alienated. Griffith discussed the visit with leaders in Mississippi. He authored memos and papers promoting the visit to the Reagan campaign. It was a very parochial request, focused on winning the state. "Looking at what Carter did in 1976 and what (Reagan) had to do to move the state now into the Reagan column, clearly that is where we needed to win," Griffith remembered. The decision to go Philadelphia was made based only on the numbers. Historically, the Neshoba County Fair was known for the speeches made by the state's political candidates and Griffith viewed it as the most "important and colorful political event" in Mississippi. Reagan's visit touched on the difficulties future Republicans would face while campaigning on philosophical issues, like federalism, that the opposition in the South would try to link to race. The visit, along with the speech, sparked an outcry from Democratic leaders. Andrew Young's op-ed piece, "Chilling Words in Neshoba County," appeared in the Washington Post on Aug. 11, 1980, eight days after Reagan spoke in Philadelphia: "Traditionally, these code words have been the electoral language of Wallace, Goldwater and the Nixon southern strategy. So one must ask: Is Reagan saying that he intends to do everything he can to turn the clock back to the Mississippi justice of 1964? That is why code words like 'states' rights' and symbolic places like Philadelphia, Miss., leave me cold." In the "Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans," historian Douglas Gould wrote that Reagan's speech "could be defended as racially neutral but which a southerner unhappy with black progress could also interpret as an affirmation of his opinions." Cannon wrote in the Post that "The Reagan campaign's hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to this fair, a popular summer gathering place for rural Mississippians." "It didn't even occur to me the entire time - the problems with the civil rights workers," Griffith said. "In Mississippi, that was not the identity it had. Everybody thought of it as this amazing institution where all politics happened." Griffith rejects the criticisms that Reagan's visit was part of a strategy to use racial "code words" in an effort to attract white voters. "Nothing about Ronald Reagan ever suggested - nothing in his policies, nothing in his background - that race was made an issue," he said. "It certainly wasn't intended, (race) was absolutely not a part of the entire effort. I don't even know why those words got in there," Griffith said about the speech's reference to states' rights. "Anybody who was there knows it was the most amazing event. The place was crazy. There were tens of thousands of people there, lined up all the way in - it was the most amazing thing. Reagan was just beside himself. He was like, 'I've never seen anything like this!'" Griffith said the visit to Mississippi, despite the criticism nationally, helped shift the connection Carter had enjoyed with these same voters in 1976 to Reagan. It worked. "As usual, when there is a good idea, everybody else was the genius," he laughed. ------- David Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com. |
