Getting Away with Murder: The Twentieth-Century Struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. Senate

Vanessa A. Holloway

doi:10.5771/9780761864332

Summary

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the US Congress engaged in bitter debates on whether to enact a federal law that would prosecute private citizens who lynched black Americans. In Getting Away with Murder, the fundamental question under scrutiny is whether Southern Democrats’ racist attitudes toward black Americans pardoned the atrocities of lynching. The book investigates underlying motives of opposition to Senate filibustering and invites an intellectual discussion on why Southern Democrats thought states’ rights were the remedy to lynching, when, in fact, the phenomenon was a baffling national crisis. A rebuttal to this query may include notions that congressional investigations into state-protected rights were deemed unconstitutional. In a unifying theme, the appeal ties into questions of the federalism-civil rights debate by noting intervals that warrant research and advancing new perspectives intended to accentuate the matrices of race-based politics. To examine the federalism-civil rights debate, this book asks three practical questions: (1) Would Southern Democrats suspend their friendships with private citizens and enact a federal law that would prosecute them for lynching? (2) Was the national government limited in its constitutional power to protect black Americans from private citizens who organized themselves as lynch mobs? (3) Were concerns for states’ rights the core reasons for Senate filibustering, or did Southern Democrats’ argument for states’ rights support the lie of racism?

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2014
Copyright Year: 2014
ISBN-Print: 978-0-7618-6432-5
ISBN-Online: 978-0-7618-6433-2
Publisher: Hamilton Books, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 111
Product Type: Monograph

1. Contents No access
2. Foreword No access
3. Preface No access
4. Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 14
1 The Conduit to Getting Away with Murder No access Pages 15 - 24
2 “No” with Authority, the Solid South in Congress No access Pages 25 - 34
3 Blaming Racism and the Democratic Solidarity in the Senate No access Pages 35 - 44
4 White Supremacy, the Unwritten Law of the Land No access Pages 45 - 54
5 The Disappointment, Stymied by Old Southern Politics No access Pages 55 - 64
Appendix A No access Pages 65 - 78
Appendix B No access Pages 79 - 102
Selected Bibliography No access Pages 103 - 111