Republicans and Racism

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/opinion/republicans-and-racism.html

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To the Editor:

I applaud David Leonhardt’s argument in “The Urgency of Ethnic Nationalism” (column, April 25) that left and right alike need to oppose the racism, anti-Semitism and ugly nationalism that are surging in global politics. But I am afraid that he lets the Republican Party off a bit too easily in this regard.

True, it is the party of Lincoln, as he acknowledges. But long before it was the party of Donald Trump, it was also the party of Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Richard Nixon, whose Southern strategy set the template for contemporary race-baiting campaigns; Ronald Reagan, who launched his 1980 general election campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., near the site of the murders of the civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner; and Lee Atwater, the mastermind behind George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad.

While neither side is blameless here, the record over the last half-century or more is far from even.

ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN, BALTIMORE

The writer is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.