Thank you Ben Greenberg
That panel is a chunk of a cartoon Ben posted at his site, Hungry Blues. Said cartoon saves me from having to write anything more about Reagan, pretty much for the rest of my life.
Truth, I only get by Hungry Blues every so often because it feels a bit like eavesdropping. Much of it was about his investigations into his father's life (his father, Paul Greenberg, was deep in the mix with the Civil Rights movement).
He's now expanding his focus a bit, while keeping the ethics intact:
This year's Democratic National Convention in Boston will mark the 40th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's noble failure in Atlantic City. The failure of the MFDP laid bare the hypocrisy of Democrats who professed Jeanne's values. The MFDP failure also exposed the sadly compromised position of liberal Blacks and whites, largely from the SCLC and organized labor (the liberal coalition my father was part of). Yes, it's true that the MFDP representatives were defeated by the "emptiness inside the box," to use Jeanne's phrase—but they came to Atlantic City to demand that the promises of representative democracy be met. They came with a belief in what the wrapping paper seemed to promise would be inside.
I'm mentioning the MFDP now because we, as a nation, desperately need the Democratic Party to stand for what the MFDP stood for. If to get George Bush out of the White House we must support John Kerry, then we must make sure that John Kerry knows that his constituents expect him to live up to the radicalism of the Langston Hughes quote used in the Kerry slogan, "Let America be America again." [P6: emphasis added]
It's my impression that even folks reasonably familiar with Civil Rights Movement history don't know about the MFDP. As this year's Democratic National Convention approaches, I'd like to recall the events in Atlantic City with some passages from James Foreman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries. In the 1960s, Foreman was Executive Secretary and Director of International Affairs of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
