Work in Progress: Work in Progress

Work in Progress is a recurring feature on CAMPAIGN TRAILS for paid subscribers.

I’m using it to share some of the more interesting materials I’ve uncovered in the past few years of research for my book-in-progress on the work of John Doar and the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of taking part in a terrific biennial conference on American political history at Vanderbilt, where I presented a paper that was an actual “work in progress” talk drawn from this new book.

I presented the draft of a full chapter a couple months ago at Emory, but because this is a shorter, more digestible paper I thought I’d just offer it here — both to give a sneak peak of my forthcoming book, but also to provide an example of how academics roll out a new project to colleagues at conferences. As you’ll see, we tend to use deep dives into parts of a project to gesture at larger trends we’ll cover in the work.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it!

Seeking Justice: The Civil Rights Division and Local Actors

In my current project, I’m chronicling the work of the Civil Rights Division during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, drawing on the recently opened papers of John Doar, a top official there.

One story I’m tracing is about the federal government learning its own strength and finding the will to exercise it in the field of civil rights. And part of that process was the federal government first learning about its own weaknesses.

So, in keeping with this conference’s theme of “the rebuilding of institutional trust (and trustworthy institutions)” I’d like to discuss how the Civil Rights Division decided who was and wasn’t trustworthy within the ranks of “the federal government” as it began its work.

An early chapter in the book will explore a pioneering case the Division filed against voting rights discrimination in Haywood County, Tennessee — just outside Memphis — in 1960. Through its interventions here, the Civil Rights Division quickly learned that its initial practices of relying on local FBI agents (to conduct interviews) and local U.S. Attorneys (to decide if a case was warranted) were inherently flawed.

Both the FBI agents and the U.S. Attorneys were members of the communities they served, often sharing the biases of local whites and doing whatever they could to maintain white supremacy.

Following the lead of J. Edgar Hoover in seeing civil rights activity as akin to communism, FBI agents did the bare minimum when asked to investigate, often passing along minimalist reports that reflected only what had already been relayed in the news.

U.S. Attorneys, meanwhile, were political appointees with larger political ambitions. They, too, wanted to have as little to do with the political dynamite of civil rights as humanly possible. Their interests trumped the institution’s needs.

Let me illustrate what that meant: