Lobbyists and the Civil Rights Legislative Agenda, 1945-1964

• In Event: Confronting Exclusion and Inequality: Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

Both popular and scholarly accounts of the development of civil rights policy in the mid-twentieth-century United States tend to zero in on the momentous legislative achievements of the Second Reconstruction, in turn evincing a sense of inevitability as to the content and sequence of the legislative civil rights reform that was enacted between 1957 and 1968. This paper takes an important step towards problematizing these historic policy developments by exploring how lobbyists for civil rights and allied organizations collaborated from the mid-1940s through passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to shape the legislative agenda – that is, to influence which civil rights reforms policymakers should prioritize and what exactly their contents should be.
The paper focuses in particular on fair employment as a core element of the postwar civil rights lobbying agenda. This was the issue that brought pro-civil rights advocacy groups into collaboration in the first place after World War II, and its incorporation (however imperfectly) into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sheds light on the extent of interest groups’ capacity to exercise agenda-setting power within the legislative process. In exploring these developments, the paper heeds Megan Ming Francis’ recent call for American Political Development (APD) scholars to investigate how the trajectory of the civil rights state has been shaped by contestation between institutional and social movement actors. While her own work and others’ have begun to do this in earlier and later policymaking contexts, APD research on the development of civil rights legislation from World War II through the mid-1960s – i.e. the heyday of the “Second Reconstruction” – focuses squarely on the motivations of and interactions among institutional actors alone. By examining civil rights lobbyists’ efforts to persuade members of Congress and the executive branch of the substantive importance and political viability of their legislative preferences, this paper enhances our understanding of the momentous developments of this period and affirms the need for theorizing non-institutional actors’ role in the creation of civil rights policy.

Author

• Shamira M. Gelbman, Wabash College