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.
