Naomi Murakawa - The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America

Studies in Postwar American Political Development

Steven Teles, Series Editor

Series Board Members:

Jennifer Hochschild

Desmond King

Sanford Levinson

Taeku Lee

Shep Melnick

Paul Pierson

John Skrentny

Adam Sheingate

Reva Siegel

Thomas Sugrue

The Delegated Welfare State: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Policy

Kimberly J. MorganandAndrea Louise Campbell

Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

Geoffrey Kabaservice

Engines of Change: Party Factions in American Politics, 18682010

Daniel DiSalvo

Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics

Sarah Reckhow

The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling

Jal Mehta

Rich Peoples Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent

Isaac William Martin

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Protection From Lawless Racial Violence

The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence....We shall re-establish freedom from fear in America so that America can take the lead of re-establishing freedom from fear in the world. And to those who say that law-and-order is the code word for racism, here is a reply: Our goal is justicejustice for every American.

Richard Nixons Acceptance of the Republican Party Nomination for President, August 8, 1968

The [first] Condition of Our Rights [is] the Right to Safety and Security of the Person....Too many of our people still live under the harrowing fear of violence or death at the hands of a mob or of brutal treatment by police officers. Many fear entanglement with the law because of the knowledge that the justice rendered in some courts is not equal for all persons.

President Harry S. Trumans Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These

One black man in the White House, one million black men in the Big House. This juxtaposition, used by many, captures the seemingly impossible reality of postcivil rights America. On the night of his election as forty-fourth president of the United States, Barack Obama took the stage in Chicagos Grant Park as self-declared proof that America is a place where all things are possible, and more than one commentator marked the first African American president as Exhibit A for the case that we have overcome.

This is the strange racial present, when talk of futuristic post-racialism coexists with a punishment system deemed a bridge to the racial past, even the new Jim Crow. This postcivil rights condition is so perfectly insidious that it seems the outcome of a grand plan. Indeed, the rise of mass incarceration appears to fulfill Richard Nixons 1968 campaign pledge to restore the first civil right of every American, which Nixon alternatively characterized as freedom from domestic violence, the right to be safe, and freedom from fear. Of course, Nixons first civil right was striking precisely because it was not the first civil right of its time, following as it did the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Warren Courts expansion of rights of the accused. As a co-optation of civil rights discourse, Nixons messages established a rank order: the implicitly white right to safety was paramount, not to be threatened by special minority and criminal rights. As if following Nixons 1968 call to fight narcotics peddlers and merchants of crime, lawmakers have over time enacted mandatory penalties and funded prison construction, facilitating the septupling of the incarcerated population from 1968 to 2010. When witnessed through a Nixonian lens of law-and-order as racism-free justice for every American, occupants of the White House and the Big House simply confirm each others legitimacy. Taken together, the presidents successes and the prisoners failures authenticate meritocracy, untainted by venomous white hatred and sentimental white lenience. As African American prisoners catapult the U.S. incarceration rate to the highest in the world, it seems that Nixons first civil right was promise and prophecy of what was to come.