Lobbyists and the Civil Rights Legislative Agenda, 1945-1964

• In Event: Comparative Agenda Setting: Messaging, Communicating and Legislating

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.

Author

• Shamira M. Gelbman, Wabash College