Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State. By Megan Ming Francis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 197 pp., $27.99 paper.

Abstract

Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State. By Megan Ming Francis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 197 pp., $27.99 paper.Megan Ming Francis' new book, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State, tells the story of how the early anti-lynching crusade of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) shaped the modern civil rights movement. The book is crisply written, well-documented, and powerfully argued. It should be read by anyone interested in the history of civil rights in the United States as well as American Political Development (APD), institutional choice, and social movements. The book represents a key contribution to a growing trend that seeks to understand the micro-foundations of the evolution of the American state and federal policy, which offers a decentered account of institutional development in American politics and underscores the role of groups in creating opportunities for change from the bottom-up.At its core, Francis' book is a fascinating political history that seeks to fill a gap in our understanding of the civil rights movement in the United States. Whereas most accounts begin with the story of school desegregation, Francis starts with the founding of the NAACP and its fight against lynching. By pushing the time-line back, Francis brings to light the importance of the NAACP's victory in Moore v. Dempsey (1923), the historic Supreme Court decision that marked the first federal intervention into state crim-inal court proceedings. Francis shows how this initial victory influenced subsequent NAACP campaigns, including its securing of funding that led to the establishment of the Legal Defense Fund, which fueled the fight to desegregate schools. In the process, Francis ties the struggle over civil rights to campaigns against political violence and a profoundly unjust criminal justice system-issues that are still at the core of the ongoing fight for racial equality.It would be a mistake, however, to think of Francis' book as a gap-filling exercise. The heart of the analysis grapples with longstanding debates over the role of structure and agency in politics and social change. Francis argues that the existing literature tends to focus narrowly on the structural aspects of the story, describing the shifting opportunity structure of American politics in the shadow of Cold War imperatives. Francis directly challenges this view, arguing that [t]he problem with these top-down accounts of political change is that they privilege institutions over citizen agency and thus understate the role of civil society and different forms of civic (p. 15). The critical point is that, even if we accept the importance of institutions and the ever-shifting opportunity structure in American politics-and Francis is careful to acknowledge these factors-these opportunities are not self-executing, actors must seize these opportunities and decide how to exploit them. Francis takes us into that process, revealing its contingency and historical context. What emerges is a reclaiming of agency in the process of change, even in a case where the institutional opportunities for change were highly constrained.Stepping further back, Francis' work is part of a broader movement in APD literature that seeks to explore the grassroots foundations of the development of the state and federal policy. Other works along these lines include Charles Epp's Making Rights Real (2009), which details the creation of coalitions between activists and professionals that gave rise to new modes of governance at the local level, and Douglas Reed's The Building of the Federal Schoolhouse (2014), which identifies the ways in which local groups and urban politics has shaped (and been shaped by) decades of federal school policy. Anyone interested in APD must heed the call of these works to explore how group and individual level activity and local politics influence the state and federal policy development. …