Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State

Did the civil rights movement impact the development of the American state? Despite extensive accounts of civil rights mobilization and narratives of state building, there has been surprisingly little research that explicitly examines the importance and consequence that civil rights activism has had for the process of state building in American political and constitutional development. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP's battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to 1923, this book examines how the NAACP raised public awareness, won over American presidents, and secured the support of Congress. In the NAACP's most far-reaching victory, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional rights of black defendants were violated by a white mob in the landmark criminal procedure decision Moore v. Dempsey. This book demonstrates the importance of citizen agency in the making of new constitutional law in a period unexplored by previous scholarship.

1. Rethinking civil rights and American political development; 2. The birth of the NAACP, mob violence, and the challenge of public opinion; 3. The unsteady march into the Oval Office; 4. Anti-lynching legislation and the sinking of the Republican ship in Congress; 5. Defending the right to live; 6. Civil rights bound; Appendix: manuscript sources.

Megan Ming Francis is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University, Malibu. She completed her PhD in the department of politics at Princeton University, New Jersey in 2008, and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago in 2008–9 and as a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center of Law, Society, and Culture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law in 2009–10. Francis's research interests include American political development, race, crime, civil liberties, and civil rights.