The day President Reagan comforted a black family who had a KKK cross burned on their lawn

The Washington Post ^ | August 27th 2017 | DeNeen L. Brown

[Ennis85]

President Reagan read the story about the cross burning in his morning Washington Post. A black family in College Park, Md., had just won a civil suit against a young Ku Klux Klan leader who had been convicted of terrorizing them five years earlier.

Reagan’s deputy press secretary, Larry Speakes, said the president was jarred by what had happened to Phillip and Barbara Butler. “That was the first thing on his mind this morning,” Speakes told The Post on May 3, 1982. White House Chief of Staff James Baker and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver walked into the Oval Office, and the first thing he said to them was, “ ‘I’ve read this story. I’d like to go see these people.’ ”

Deaver found the Butlers at their jobs at the Government Printing Office, where they both worked as printers, and told them the president wanted to visit them at their home.

The Butlers had been newlyweds when they bought the house in 1976. They were the fifth black family to move into the neighborhood. They had lived there for five months when, on Jan. 30, 1977, the Klan burned the cross on their front lawn.

William Aitcheson, then a University of Maryland student and “exalted cyclops” of a Ku Klux Klan lodge, was charged with burning crosses at the Butlers and five other properties, including a synagogue, and sending a death threat to Coretta Scott King, the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But by the time a federal judge ordered Aitcheson, who had been convicted and sentenced to 90 days of jail, to pay the Butlers $23,000 in civil damages, his whereabouts were unknown, according to the 1982 Post story that President Reagan read.

This week, Aitcheson re-emerged in an astonishing way.

[OttawaFreeper]

Here WaPo, tell me and others here something we don’t know, like how you and your other Media Party brethren almost always portrayed Ronald Reagan as a demented old man who was one step away from giving us a nuclear winter or if not that, some insensitive so and so who made the rich richer and the poor poorer (particularly in Democrat controlled cities). And most likely in 1982, there was probably very little or nothing right Reagan could do concerning race relations in your eyes as well.

[hillarys cankles]

The comments, all I can do is shake my head. Even with a story like this the Leftists cannot contain themselves. There was nothing bad about this story and yet Reagan was being called a racist and a bigot. It’s why those two words have no punch anymore. The left labels EVERYONE they don’t agree with a racist and bigot.

[Ancesthntr]

F the Compost. They never had a single fair story or kind word for Reagan until he died. I was in DC then, and I have never forgotten. They have no right to use ANYTHING about him now, for any purpose.

[mairdie]

It feels like what they’re doing with this article is trying to say that EVEN Reagan was better on the racial issues than Trump. Everything I read seems slanted to make Trump look bad.

[fieldmarshaldj]

You’re exactly right. The deranged leftist nutters in the comments section confirm that.

[Deplorable American1776]

My God, the comments are anti Trump, even from so called Conservatives. Of course, someone blamed Reagan for AIDS...

[wjcsux]

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