Race, Coercion, and Liberation in American Political Development

Why do coercive institutions rise and fall? While this question receives vast attention in the comparative politics literature, Americanists have been slower to take up this question. This is surprising since the United States has had some of the most coercive institutions throughout history such as chattel slavery, apartheid, and the police. This dissertation, inspired by the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, uses a race and class analysis to understand the political development and destruction of coercive institutions in three key moments of U.S history. The first chapter critically analyzes the Reconstruction period as a critical juncture in the rise of the initial policing apparatus known as convict lease that locked up African Americans and sold their labor to white entrepreneurs. I argue that the federal government's attempted, but ultimately unsuccessful efforts at transitioning the South from a slave society to a free society interacted with both the underlying economic structure that required coerced labor and the racial history of the region that made coercion relatively easy against African Americans to produce a highly coercive state apparatus of police and prisons. Using newly collected data on the universe of all prisoners in the Georgia state penitentiary system, I find evidence suggesting that the attempted military transition of Southern society led to an increase in the growth of policing and incarceration in Georgia. Given the importance of coerced labor to the Southern economy following Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era, the second chapter (co-authored with James Feigenbaum and Cory Smith) asks whether race-class subjugation responds to shocks to economic structures. Using a unique natural experiment from the quasi-random spread of the Boll Weevil, which destroyed a large fraction of cotton crops in the South from 1890-1920, we find evidence that negative shocks to coercive societies can actually lead to less coercion. Additional analyses suggest that this might happen because African Americans ``voted with their feet\" by migrating away coercive regions. Finally, I move to the period of the Civil Rights Movement and ask whether the political destruction of coercive institutions can happen from ``below.\" The third chapter (published in the AJPS) provides evidence that whites in areas exposed to Civil Rights protests in the 1960s seemed to have become modestly more racially liberal in response to Black-led Civil Rights protests suggesting that the ideological basis of race-class subjugation responds to the push and pull of social movements.