1960s

The 1960s were a turning point in the book’s account of American race and justice: civil-rights activism and new federal laws challenged entrenched racial subordination, but they also prompted resistance that preserved old power in new forms. The decade appears not as a clean break from the past, but as a struggle over who would control public memory, legal institutions, and the meaning of equality.

Civil-rights change and the backlash of symbols

The book places the 1960s within a longer history of racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction collapsed, white supremacy returned across the South, and racial restrictions helped sustain Jim Crow laws and the policing of intimacy between Black men and white women. Against that inheritance, civil-rights activism and federal laws in the 1950s and 1960s represented a direct challenge to the racial order. The response, the book argues, was not merely rhetorical: Confederate imagery surged again as a visible expression of resistance to racial progress.

That imagery had an established political history. Terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used symbols of the Confederate South to intimidate Black communities; Alabama declared Confederate Memorial Day a state holiday around the turn of the century, soon after white officials rewrote the state constitution to protect white supremacy. After the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was unconstitutional, Southern states raised Confederate flags over government buildings. Confederate monuments and imagery proliferated during the Civil Rights Era, and Alabama added the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president, as a state holiday. The book presents these acts as a backlash with material and institutional reach, not as an isolated dispute over historical decoration.

Legal change and persistent exclusion

The decade also forms part of a slower transformation in jury selection. The United States Supreme Court had ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding Black people from jury service was unconstitutional, yet all-white juries remained common for decades. In the Deep South, jury rolls drawn from voting lists excluded many African Americans; after the Voting Rights Act, officials continued to keep jury pools largely white through other means, including standards such as being “intelligent and upright.” Rulings in the 1970s against underrepresentation brought more Black people to courthouses for possible selection, but did not guarantee that they would serve.

In the mid-1960s, the Court held that prosecutors could not use discretionary peremptory strikes in a racially discriminatory manner. The standard it set for proving discrimination was so demanding, however, that no one successfully challenged such strikes for twenty years. Prosecutors continued to remove all or nearly all Black prospective jurors, leaving defendants—including Walter McMillian, who faced trial in a county that was 40 percent Black—at risk of being judged by all-white juries. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made challenges to discriminatory strikes more direct and offered renewed hope, but, as the book notes, also encouraged prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. The sequence shows legal reform and its circumvention unfolding together.

Institutions, mental health, and punishment

The period’s changes extended beyond civil-rights law. In the 1960s and 1970s, laws made involuntary commitment more difficult, and deinstitutionalization became an objective in many states. Legal advocates secured court rulings requiring states to move residents of institutions into community programs, while people with developmental disabilities gained stronger rights to refuse treatment. These reforms answered abuses within mental institutions, where people had been confined for behavior that challenged social, cultural, or sexual norms and where treatments such as Thorazine were sometimes overused with terrible side effects.

The book sets that history beside a later consequence: as institutional beds disappeared, people with serious mental illness increasingly encountered a criminal justice system that was poorly equipped to care for them. The 1960s thus belong to a broader account of institutional change in which a necessary rejection of coercive confinement did not itself ensure adequate community care. The resulting gap helps explain why mental illness and imprisonment recur together in the book’s cases.

The decade’s longer shadow

The book connects the history of racial terror after Reconstruction to the modern death penalty, arguing that lynching helped shape a system of rapid executions that could redirect violence while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still face the ultimate punishment. The civil-rights struggles of the 1960s are therefore part of a longer contest over whether changes in law would alter the institutions and assumptions that outlasted slavery and segregation.

That contest also shapes the book’s present-day legal encounters. In a jury-selection hearing, a judge granted a motion after evidence showed that a community that was about 27 percent Black had a jury pool that was only 10 percent Black, yet the judge complained about attention to minority rights and invoked the rights of “Confederate Americans.” The moment condenses the decade’s unresolved legacy: formal legal protections can make exclusion contestable, while old racial narratives continue to surface inside the institutions charged with enforcing those protections.