Getting Away with Murder: The Twentieth-Century Struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. Senate

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the U.S. Congress engaged in bitter debates on whether to enact a federal law that would prosecute private citizens who lynched black Americans. In Getting Away with Murder, the fundamental question under scrutiny is whether Southern Democrats’ racist attitudes toward black Americans pardoned the atrocities of lynching. The book investigates underlying motives of opposition to Senate filibustering and invites an intellectual discus...