For Blacks, Reagan Means “A Chilling Effect”

Ronald Reagan’s victory has let black Americans know in a clear and visceral way what civil libertarians mean when they talk, in other contexts, about “a chilling effect.” It reminds older blacks of times and attitudes they had hoped had disappeared forever from American life and thought. It has made some younger blacks suspect that the uproar about civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s was overblown.

But, in the end, the advent of the Reagan administration may serve to spur a new period of creativity among blacks to fashion new attacks on the searing problems that still afflict large segments of the black population.

It is useful here to look back at how America felt in the late ’30s and through ...