Reagan used color-blind rhetoric to commemorate a sanitized King

Evidence

In the Rose Garden, however, Reagan did not hold forth on the perils of big government. Instead, he told a brief story of the civil rights movement, a story that confirmed for him the “sense that true justice must be color-blind, and that among white and black Americans, as [King] put it, their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone.” It was a familiar story of American progress on the racial front—one that began with Rosa Parks’s defiant act in Montgomery, Alabama, included the March on Washington, and resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 287

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Reagan used racially coded language that racists understood without spelling out — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 148