Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Today, I have a story about presidential compassion. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan

wasn't exactly known for his racial sensitivity. His relationship with African Americans was

strained by his repeated references to quote, welfare queens

and efforts to cut government programs for the poor. But on May 3rd, 1982, President Reagan

perused his morning Washington Post and became fixated on a front page story. It was about a black

family in College Park, Maryland, that had just won a civil suit against

a young Ku Klux Klan leader who had been convicted of terrorizing them five years earlier.

When Reagan's top aides came to see him that morning, he told them, quote, I've read this

story.

I'd like to go see these people.

These people were Philip and Barbara Butler.

The butlers had been newlyweds when they bought their house in college park in

1976.

They were only the fifth black family to move into the neighborhood.

They had lived there for five months when in January of 1977,

they woke up to find something truly horrifying, a cross burning on their front lawn.

It was the work of the KKK, one member specifically.

William Atchison, then a University of Maryland student, and a, quote, exalted cyclops of the KKK lodge was charged with burning crosses at the butlers

and five other properties, including a synagogue.

He also sent a death threat to Kareta Scott King, the widow of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

But by the time a federal judge ordered Atchison to pay the butler's $23,000 in civil damages,

...