Strengthening the Weak State

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 inUnited States v. PriceandUnited 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.