“‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1954–1976” Restricted; Files Only
Billups, William (Spring 2024)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation explains how an era of racial violence shaped the civil rights movement and US law enforcementduring the decades after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Between 1955 and 1976, racial militants generated four waves of terrorism that corresponded to distinct phases of civil rights activism and federal enforcement. This project analyzes those waves of violence by focusing on 871 arsons and bombings. Looking at those attacks with quantitative and qualitative methods illuminates how anti–civil rights terrorism, though concentrated in the US South, was a national phenomenon with international dimensions. It also varied according to local contexts and influenced US law and law enforcement from the local to the national level. Congress expanded federal jurisdictions over civil rights crimes, including bombings, and state and local police forces created bomb squads and other specialized units to combat racial terrorism. Government responses to anti–civil rights violence contributed to the twentieth-century growth, federalization, and professionalization of US police forces. This dissertation illuminates numerous attacks that historians have not yet studied, and its greatest contribution is how it analyzes together acts of violence that have been treated separately in the past. Connecting print and digitized sources as well as dozens of physical archives, including ones in Europe and South Africa, the project links US civil rights history to scholarship on international antisemitism and far-right networks and movements. This approach provides a new understanding of how racial terrorism was an influential strain of political violence at midcentury. Anti–civil rights arsonists and bombers were neither isolated white reactionaries nor the extreme excesses of white resistance to civil rights reform. Most were calculating political actors whose targeted violence undermined the civil rights movement. Their actions led to changes in criminal law and policing at home and inspired far-right extremists overseas. Through arsons, bombings, and related acts of terror, violent white supremacists proved integral, and typically effective, parts of a national white backlash against civil rights reform.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: “Violence and the Second Reconstruction: the Post-Brown Wave of Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism, 1954–1959” 20
Chapter 2: “The Ku Klux Klan and the World: A Global History of Anti-Jewish Violence During the Civil Rights Era” 77
Chapter 3: “Anti–Civil Rights Bombings and the Making of the Civil Rights Act of 1960" 134
Chapter 4 : “The Ballot and the Bomb: Violence against School Desegregation and Black Voter Registration Drives in the Deep South, 1962–1965” 180
Chapter 5: “The War on Poverty and the Increasing Antigovernment Orientation of Anti–Civil Rights Terrorists in Mississippi, 1965–1970” 240
Chapter 6: “Stopping the Bus: Racial Violence and Civil Rights Politics in 1970s America” 296
Conclusion 357
Bibliography 366
Reference List of Non-Print Sources 417
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