Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wpx84 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-15T00:22:09.744Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

STRENGTHENING THE WEAK STATE

Politicizing the American State's “Weakness” on Racial Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2012

Daniel Kato
Daniel Kato*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Kalamazoo College
*
*Daniel Kato, Kalamazoo College, 1200 Academy Street, Kalamazoo, MI 49006. E-mail: daniel.kato@kzoo.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay charts the development of the American state during the era when Southern lynchings prevailed. Contrary to the standard interpretation that depicts the American state as having lacked the administrative and legal capacity to protect the lives of Southern Blacks, it is a more pluralist conception of state weakness for which I argue, one that characterizes the American state's behavior regarding racial violence as the deliberate, calculated act of an active state choosing not to act. The state had always possessed legal authority to prosecute lynch mobs, but the key determinant was garnering the political will to enforce the law. Examples gleaned from the Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR), and Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) administrations illustrate the American government's political vacillation between acting and not acting. Examinations of two Supreme Court cases in 1966 highlight the political nature of federal rights enforcement. In light of the 1966 Supreme Court decisions in United States v. Price and United States v. Guest, the Court appears never to have repudiated or stripped the federal government of all of its authority to engage in combating racial violence. Even though the Court clearly signaled during Reconstruction that it was not going to uphold claims of rights violations of Blacks in the South, it did so without ever making a substantive decision on whether it could. Sections 241 and 242 of Title 18 of the United States Code were, in effect, placed into suspended animation; it was only when there was a political will to reengage with federal rights enforcement that the Court resuscitated these laws. In the parlance of the weak state thesis, the American state did not lose its capacity to combat racial violence; rather it simply chose not to engage.

Keywords

Racial ViolenceWeak StateFederal Rights EnforcementLynchingUnited States v. PriceUnited States v. Guest
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 2012 , pp. 457 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Akerman, Amos T. (1869). Amos T. Akerman to Charles Sumner, April 2. Sumner Papers, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Akerman, Amos T. (1871). Amos T. Akerman to B. Silliman, November 9. Amos T. Akerman Papers, University of Virginia.Google Scholar
Ali, Perveen (2011). I Am Iraq: Law, Life and Violence in the Formation of the Iraqi State. Utrecht Law Review, 7: 4–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ames, Blanche Butler and Ames, Adelbert (1957). Chronicles from the Nineteenth Century: Family Letters of Blanche Butler and Adelbert Ames, Married July 21st, 1870. Clinton, MA: Privately Issued.Google Scholar
Avins, Alfred (1966). The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871: Some Reflected Light in State Action and the Fourteenth Amendment. Saint Louis University Law Journal, 11: 331–381.Google Scholar
Ayers, Edward L. (1992). The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Belknap, Michal R. (1982). The Legal Legacy of Lemuel Penn. Howard Law Journal, 25: 467–524.Google Scholar
Belknap, Michal R. (1987). Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Belknap, Michal R. (Ed.) (1991). Justice Department Civil Rights Policies Prior to 1960: Crucial Documents from the Files of Arthur Brann Caldwell. New York: Garland Publishers.Google Scholar
Bell, Derrick (2008). Race, Racism, and American Law. New York: Aspen.Google Scholar
Bell v. Maryland (1964). 378 U.S. 226.Google Scholar
Benedict, Michael Les (1978). Preserving Federalism: Reconstruction and the Waite Court. The Supreme Court Review, 1978(January 1): 39–79.Google Scholar
Bensel, Richard Franklin (1990). Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brandwein, Pamela (2007). A Judicial Abandonment of Blacks? Rethinking the “State Action” Cases of the Waite Court. Law & Society Review, 41(2): 343–386.Google Scholar
Brandwein, Pamela (2011). Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh (1993). Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Charles W. (2006). Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Carrigan, William D. and Webb, Clive (2003). The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928. Journal of Social History, 37(2): 411–438.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carson, Clayborne (1981). In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Chadbourn, James Harmon (1933). Lynching and the Law. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Civil Rights Cases (1883). 109 U.S. 3.Google Scholar
Corbin, Daniel (1872). Corbin to Williams, Nov. 2. Northern and Middle District of Alabama, Source Chronological File, in Record Group 60, “Records of the Department of Justice,” National Archives.Google Scholar
Cresswell, Stephen Edward (1991). Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansmen: Federal Law Enforcement in the South and West, 1870–1893. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Cutler, James Elbert (1969). Lynch-Law; an Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States. New York: Negro Universities Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert A. (1956). A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert A. (1957). Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker. Journal of Public Law, 6: 279–295.Google Scholar
Davis, William Watson (1914). The Federal Enforcement Acts. In Dunning, William Archibald and Fleming, Walter Lynwood (Eds.), Studies in Southern History and Politics, Inscribed to William Archibald Dunning, Ph.D, LL.D, Lieber Professor of History and Political Philosophy in Columbia University, by his Former Pupils the Authors, pp. 205–230. NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Dobbin, Frank and Sutton, John R. (1998). The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions. American Journal of Sociology, 104(2): 441–476.Google Scholar
Dray, Philip (2002). At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Eisenhower, Dwight D. ([1957] 1996). Telegram To Richard Brevard Russell, 27 September. In Galambos, L. and van Ee, D. (Eds.) The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ⟨http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/second-term/documents/359.cfm⟩ (accessed September 1, 2012).Google Scholar
Elliff, John T. (1987). The United States Department of Justice and Individual Rights, 1937–1962. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Ferrell, Claudine L. (1986). Nightmare and Dream: Antilynching in Congress, 1917–1922. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric (1988). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Frymer, Paul (2003). Acting When Elected Officials Won't: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Unions, 1935–85. American Political Science Review, 97(03): 483–499.Google Scholar
Frymer, Paul (2004). Race, Labor, and the Twentieth-Century American State. Politics & Society, 32(4): 475–509.Google Scholar
Gillette, William (1979). Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Ginzburg, Ralph (1988). 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Leslie Friedman (2007). The Specter of the Second Amendment: Rereading Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank. Studies in American Political Development, 21(02): 131–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzales-Day, Ken (2006). Lynching in the West, 1850–1935. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Grant, Ulysses Simpson (2000). The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Volume 24: 1873. Simon, John Y. (Ed.). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Gressman, Eugene (1951). Unhappy History of Civil Rights Legislation. Michigan Law Review, 50: 1323–1358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacker, Jacob S. (2002). The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jean, Susan (2005). “Warranted” Lynchings: Narratives of Mob Violence in White Southern Newspapers, 1880–1940. American Nineteenth Century History, 6(3): 351–372.Google Scholar
Johnson, Kimberley S. (2007). Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Lyndon B. (1965). President Lyndon B. Johnson's Message to the Congress: The American Promise, March 15. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965. Volume I, entry 107, pp. 281–287. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Johnson, Lyndon B. (1971). The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Kaczorowski, Robert J. (1985). The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department of Justice and Civil Rights, 1866–1876. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira (2002). Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding. In Katznelson, Ira and Shefter, Martin (Eds.), Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, pp. 82–110. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira (2005). When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira, Geiger, Kim, and Kryder, Daniel (1993). Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950. Political Science Quarterly, 108(2): 283–306.Google Scholar
King, Desmond S. (1995). Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the U.S. Federal Government. Oxford, UK and New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
King, Desmond S. and Lieberman, Robert C. (2009a). Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State. World Politics, 61(3): 547–588.Google Scholar
King, Desmond S. and Lieberman, Robert C. (2009b). American State Building: The Theoretical Challenge. In Jacobs, Lawrence R. and King, Desmond (Eds.), The Unsustainable American State, pp. 299–322. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
King, Desmond S. and Stears, Marc (2009). The Missing State in Postwar American Political Thought. In Jacobs, Lawrence and King, Desmond (Eds.), The Unsustainable American State, pp. 116–134. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
King, Desmond and Tuck, Stephen (2007). De-Centering the South: America's Nationwide White Supremacist Order After Reconstruction. Past & Present, 194(1): 213–253.Google Scholar
Kinshasa, Kwando Mbiassi (2006). Black Resistance to the Ku Klux Klan in the Wake of the Civil War. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.Google Scholar
Klarman, Michael J. (2004). From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labbé, Ronald M. and Lurie, Jonathan (2003). The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Lane, Charles (2008). The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. New York: Henry Holt and Co.Google Scholar
Lemann, Nicholas (2006). Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Lieberman, Robert C. (1998). Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lieberman, Robert C. (2002). Weak State, Strong Policy: Paradoxes of Race Policy in the United States, Great Britain, and France. Studies in American Political Development, 16(02): 138–161.Google Scholar
Mangum, Charles Staples (1940). The Legal Status of the Negro. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Marx, Anthony W. (1998). Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Massey, Douglas S. and Denton, Nancy A. (1993). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
McFeely, William (1982). Amos T. Akerman: The Lawyer and Racial Justice. In Kousser, J. Morgan and McPherson, James M. (Eds.), Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, p. 385. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McGovern, James R. (1992). Anatomy of a Lynching. Baton Rouge, LA and London: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Migdal, Joel S. (1988). Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1969). Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918. New York: Arno Press.Google Scholar
Neuborne, Burt (2011). The Gravitational Pull of Race on the Warren Court. The Supreme Court Review, 2010(1): 59–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neumann, Franz L. (1957). The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.Google Scholar
New York Herald (1874). January 18.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. (2008). The Myth of the “Weak” American State. The American Historical Review, 113(3): 752–772.Google Scholar
Oreskes, Michael (1989). Civil Rights Act Leaves Deep mark on the American Political Landscape. New York Times, July 2. ⟨http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/02/us/civil-rights-act-leaves-deep-mark-on-the-american-political-landscape.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm⟩ (accessed October 4, 2012).Google Scholar
Patler, Nicholas (2004). Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.Google Scholar
Pfaelzer, Jean (2007). Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). 163 U.S. 537.Google Scholar
Raper, Arthur Franklin (1933). The Tragedy of Lynching. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Rauh, Joseph L. (1964). Notes on Meeting: President Johnson, Clarence Mitchell, and Joe Rauh. January 21. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. Papers, Box 26, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Conditions of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: North Carolina (1872). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Gerald N. (1991). The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Ross, Michael A. (2003). Justice of Shattered Dream: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court During the Civil War Era. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Rotnem, Victor W. (1942). The Federal Civil Right Not to Be Lynched. Washington University Law Quarterly, 28: 57–73.Google Scholar
Scheiber, Harry N. (1980). Federalism and Legal Process: Historical and Contemporary Analysis of the American System. Law & Society Review, 14(3): 663–722.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmitt, Carl (1985). Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Screws v. United States (1945). 335 U.S. 91.Google Scholar
Sefton, James E. (1967). The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–1877. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Shay, Frank (1938). Judge Lynch, His First Hundred Years. New York: I. Washburn, Inc.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda (1985). Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research. In Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (Eds.), Bringing the State Back In, pp. 3–43. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen (1982). Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen (2009). Taking Stock. In Jacobs, Lawrence R. and King, Desmond S. (Eds.), The Unsustainable American State, pp. 330–338. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Skrentny, John D. (2006). Law and the American State. Annual Review of Sociology, 32: 213–244.Google Scholar
Slaughter-House Cases 1873. 83 U.S. 36.Google Scholar
Swinney, Everette (1987). Suppressing the Ku Klux Klan: The Enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments, 1870–1877. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Sydnor, Charles S. (1940). The Southerner and the Laws. The Journal of Southern History, 6(1): 3–23.Google Scholar
Terry, Alfred (1871). Letter to Adjutant General, June 11. M666, roll 17, Letters Received, Record Group 94, National Archives.Google Scholar
Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Conditions of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: North Carolina (1872). ⟨http://ia600406.us.archive.org/20/items/reportofjointsel02unit/reportofjointsel02unit.pdf⟩ (accessed October 16, 2012).Google Scholar
Tolnay, Stewart Emory and Beck, E. M. (1995). A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Tom C.Papers, Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Trelease, Allen W. (1971). White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
United States v. Blyew (1872). 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 581.Google Scholar
United States v. Cruikshank (1876). 92 U.S. 542.Google Scholar
United States v. Guest (1966). 383 U.S. 745.Google Scholar
United States v. Harris (1883). 106 U.S. 629.Google Scholar
United States v. Price (1966). 383 U.S. 787.Google Scholar
United States v. Williams (1951). 341 U.S. 70.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress, House Committee on the Judiciary, Civil Rights: Hearings on Miscellaneous Bills Regarding the Civil Rights of Persons Within the Jurisdiction of the United States, 84th Congress, 2d session, 1956, 17–23.Google Scholar
Valelly, Richard M. (2004). The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Valelly, Richard M. (2007). Partisan Entrepreneurship and Policy Windows: George Frisbie Hoar and the 1890 Federal Election Bill. In Skowronek, Stephen and Glassman, Matthew (Eds.), Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, pp. 126–152. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Waldrep, Christopher (2000). War of Words: The Controversy over the Definition of Lynching, 1899–1940. The Journal of Southern History, 66(1): 75–100.Google Scholar
Waldrep, Christopher (2002). The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America. New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Waldrep, Christopher (2006). Lynching in America: A History in Documents. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Wang, Xi (1997). The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Nancy J. (1969). The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation. Political Science Quarterly, 84(1): 61–79.Google Scholar
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. (2002). On Lynchings. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.Google Scholar
White, Lee (1965) Lee White to Anthony Town, February 5. Gen. Human Rights (HU)2/Equality of Races/Mississippi (ST) 24, White House Central Files, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Austin, Texas.Google Scholar
Wilson, Woodrow ([1918] 2002). Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Hart, Albert Bushnell (Ed.). Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. Vann (1951). Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Woolley, Edwin C. (1964). Grant's Southern Policy. In Dunning, William Archibald and Fleming, Walter Lynwood (Eds.), Studies in Southern History and Politics, Inscribed to William Archibald Dunning, Ph.D., LL.D, Lieber Professor of History and Political Philosophy in Columbia University, by His Former Pupils the Authors, pp. 179–204. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press.Google Scholar
Zangrando, Robert L. (1980). The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar