1. Some thoughts on Trump, Sanford -- and one of the defining political events of the last 50 years: Reagan essentially kicking off his general election campaign in a city notorious for a racist killing, and ignoring that to proclaim his belief in "state's rights." It happened...
2. ...on August 3, 1980, at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Some urged Reagan not to go because it was just 16 years after the notorious KKK murder of three "Freedom Summer" civil rights workers in that county. But the Gipper cynically knew what he was...
3...doing: Sealing the bond of the GOP's "Southern Strategy" with the region's core of white supremacist voters. And it worked. I arrived in Alabama as a young journalist in early 1982 and saw the South turn red before my own eyes. Flash forward 40 years and America has a POTUS..
4..who says all the quiet parts of "the Reagan Revolution" out loud, and refuses to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like The Proud Boys. Now with just 3 weeks to save his sinking campaign, Trump is pulling a Reagan by relaunching in Sanford, Florida. It's a town...
5. that just like Philadelphia, MS, is defined by a racist killing, the stalking and murder of young Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Like the Klansmen who killed Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in 1964, Zimmerman eluded real justice. A presidential speech in Sanford...
6. ...would be a perfect moment for a leader to decry that injustice, and to talk about the roots of structural racism that are buried deep in a place like this. It goes back to the 1870s when founder Henry Shelton Stanford tried to hire Black workers in his orange groves, only..
7. to have them run off by "the violent reaction of some locals," in a state that was one of America's leaders in lynchings. Jump ahead to 1946, and Jackie Robinson's efforts to train there with the Brooklyn Dodgers were foiled TWICE when the future civil rights icon had to...
8. ...quickly flee a mob. Around that time, schoolteacher Harry Moore and his wife, Harriette, launched Sanford's first NAACP chapter, with a goal of registering more of central Florida's Black residents to vote. On Christmas Day 1951, also their wedding anniversary, someone...
9. ...threw a firebomb into their home, killing them both. You can bet there'll be no mention of this in Trump's speech tonight, nor anything about the murder of Trayvon, which started the conversation that soon sparked BLM and which erupted this summer, an eruption unseen to...
10. ...America's 45th president. Instead of acknowledging the largest mass movement in modern American history, Trump will cling to the racist, "states rights" playbook that worked so well for the Gipper in what Reagan claimed was a "morning in America." Look, there are no...
11. ...accidents in politics. Sanford is not an accident. It's not a dog whistle so much as a freight-train whistle. He wants America's dying white supremacists to hear this loud and clear....but so do we. In 3 weeks, we can end the politics of Reagan and Trump, and...
12 ...we can finally begin the future, the more just America that Trayvon Martin didn't live to see. His memory deserves that, and more. - 30 -
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