In 2013’s “The Butler,” the acclaimed movie about Eugene Allen, the African-American butler who served eight presidents, including Ronald Reagan, there is a scene in which Allen, played by Forest Whitaker, and his wife, played by Oprah Winfrey, are invited to a state dinner. In the scene Allen is portrayed as being very uncomfortable, concluding that Reagan is treating him as a token. As a result he later resigns his job.
It is decidedly an unfair portrait, but Reagan was often unfairly portrayed as racially insensitive. Allen did resign, but not because of Reagan. In fact, a member of Allen’s church recalled, “He [Allen] often talked about how nice they [the Reagans] were to him.” Another said, “He was especially fond of the Reagans.”
I mention this because this week (May 4) in 1982, President Reagan had another encounter with a Butler and his wife. Reagan was in the Oval Office reading the newspapers when he noticed a story about a black couple, Barbara and Phillip Butler, who had been awarded $23,000 in civil damages for being the victims of a cross-burning five years earlier. In 1977, the Butlers had moved to the all-white section of College Park, Maryland, and looking out a window one day they saw a burning cross on their lawn.
Although it was five years later, Reagan decided he must personally tell the Butlers that such behavior is not acceptable in America, so the president of the United States and leader of the free world ordered his schedule cleared, called for a motorcade, and off he and his wife Nancy went to College Park, dropping in on the astonished Butlers and spending 20 minutes visiting with them, their young daughter Natasha, and Barbara Butler’s mother. “I thought maybe I might just call attention to how reprehensible something of this kind is,” Reagan later told reporters, adding, “We enjoyed our visit, and when it was time to leave they saw us to our car.”
For his part, Mr. Butler said of the visit: ”I felt like he came personally. I think that he came over here on his own, not for a political reason at all.” The Butlers still have the jar of jellybeans the Reagans brought along and gave to their daughter Natasha.
As an aside, in the early 1930s when Reagan was playing football at Eureka College, he invited two African-American teammates to spend the night in his home and have breakfast with him and his family after the local hotels had refused them service. And somewhat ironically given his treatment in “The Butler,” as president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1952, Reagan insisted that Hollywood should employ more black actors.
