Dan McLaughlin has an informative post about the liberal claim that Reagan started his 1980 campaign by touting “states’ rights” at the site of the murder of three civil-rights activists. This part was new to me:
Meanwhile, President Carter opened his general election campaign in Tuscumbia, Alabama, then the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan (there was a Klan rally the day Carter came to Tuscumbia). Reagan actually got in a lot of trouble for blasting Carter for that choice of location, inaccurately describing Tuscumbia as the location of the Klan’s founding, prompting Carter to accuse Reagan of stereotyping white Southerners and the Democratic Governor of Mississippi to predict that Reagan would lose votes in the state because “voters thought it showed a lack of understanding about the South.”