1930s to 1960s

Dr. Wesley Hiers Presents

This talk is about institutional and thus structural racism at the center of the U.S. political system. In the decades before 1964, the Senate had been the “graveyard of civil rights legislation.” Since 1967, Black senators have accounted for less than 1% of Senate membership—scarcely more than the 0% figure for 1881-1966. And since 1972 the main Senate office building has been named for a man who from the 1930s to 1960s had been “the strategy chief for southern Senators opposing civil rights” (NYT, 1963).

While looking forward to a discussion of these broader issues of symbolic and descriptive representation, my presentation focuses on Senate treatment of civil rights and the filibuster rule between 1937 and 1968. Drawing on an analysis of 279 Senate roll calls, the literature on party realignment, and findings from other political-institutional sites, I offer two arguments that foreground the role of law-making institutions in reproducing racial inequality: 

contrary to the southern-centric “filibuster” story, non-southern senators from small-population states played a direct, measurable, and indispensable role in defending Jim Crow; and, contrary to the post-civil rights backlash thesis, the Republican Party shifted rightward on racial policy in the era when being conservative meant defending Jim Crow.

Both arguments undermine the putative political-institutional innocence of colorblind racial ideology. In a longer-run historical context, the second argument contributes further evidence that anti-blackness adapted to the racial regime of each era, not ideological differences of a particular era, has been a driving force of ‘democratic’ party competition across U.S. history.