This book analyzes the federal government’s role in lynchings. How did the federal government shift from an active policy of combating lynchings during Reconstruction to a policy of passivity, only then to return to the more active policy approximately eighty years later? Federal inactivity was justified on a false premise—namely, that the judiciary precluded federal rights enforcement. The judiciary did not preclude federal rights enforcement; it simply accommodated federal nonintervention. By couching inaction in terms of jurisprudential restrictions in a federalist system, political officia ... More

This book analyzes the federal government’s role in lynchings. How did the federal government shift from an active policy of combating lynchings during Reconstruction to a policy of passivity, only then to return to the more active policy approximately eighty years later? Federal inactivity was justified on a false premise—namely, that the judiciary precluded federal rights enforcement. The judiciary did not preclude federal rights enforcement; it simply accommodated federal nonintervention. By couching inaction in terms of jurisprudential restrictions in a federalist system, political officials successfully mischaracterized what actually was a political arrangement made by politicians into a matter of state rights that were to be resolved by the courts. Judicial scapegoating masked and thus empowered the political calculus of nonintervention. The key to understanding the federal government is thus situating the dynamics across branches in a manner that neither collapses law into politics entirely nor presumes these two categories are completely distinct. The term used to capture this framework is constitutional anarchy, which is a conceptual configuration of the federal government that epitomizes accurately the interplay between political vacillation and judicial accommodation as it relates to lynchings. It is a theory of interbranch dynamics that hinges on law and politics being independent and interdependent concomitantly. It schematizes how actors across all three branches of government were able to exclaim federal nonintervention without ever completely relinquishing federal authority for rights enforcement.