INTRODUCTION
Between the 1960s and 2015, the United States prison population grew from two hundred thousand to more than two million people. Currently, an astonishing 6.7 million adults are incarcerated in prisons or jails or are on probation or parole, and several hundred thousand more are detained in immigration detention centers and juvenile correctional facilities.Footnote 1 While this explosive growth in the U.S. carceral system is well documented and increasingly understood to be a deeply problematic feature of the American state, the question of how the world's largest democracy came to imprison so many of its own citizens, and especially its citizens of color, remains an essential one for students of American political development: What historical, political, and institutional processes led prison populations to skyrocket? How and when did mass incarceration and its attendant carceral structures emerge as a significant source of governing authority in the American state?Footnote 2
The rapid development of crime policy in North Carolina presents both a puzzle and a case study in how southern states contributed to the carceral turn in American politics in the last half of the twentieth century. Many scholars of mass incarceration attribute its rise to the conservative tide in American politics beginning in the late 1960s: “tough on crime” policies advanced by southern Democrats and Republicans, conservative white backlash against black civil rights, and the law-and-order politics of Nixon's Southern Strategy.Footnote 3 The frenzy to pass punitive crime policy, this literature contends, heralded a crisis for postwar liberalism and, in Michelle Alexander's artful phrase, the creation of mass incarceration as “the new Jim Crow.”Footnote 4 However, in the postwar decades North Carolina was hardly a bastion of conservative racial demagoguery. In contrast to other parts of the South, the Tar Heel state was celebrated for what historian William Chafe fittingly termed its “progressive mystique”—rapidly growing economy, modernizing Sunbelt cities, and “civil” stance on race relations.Footnote 5 And yet, available data make clear that despite its image as a progressive southern state, North Carolina was also one of the region's—and the nation's—most punitive. In the 1950s and 1960s, North Carolina substantially revised and expanded its criminal code, increased and professionalized its investigative and law enforcement agencies, increased its capacity to incarcerate juvenile offenders, and more than doubled its prison population. By the late 1970s, North Carolina often had the highest incarceration rate in the nation and, in that decade, opened five new juvenile and adult correctional facilities to warehouse its growing inmate population.Footnote 6 What prompted such a comparatively progressive southern state to pioneer state-level carceral expansion in the postwar decades, and what does this reveal about the development of the U.S. carceral state?
The puzzle presented by North Carolina suggests that the emergence of midcentury carceral policy was not solely, and perhaps not principally, the product of hard-line conservatism—even in a region known for “white authoritarian rule.”Footnote 7 Nor was it simply the result of law-and-order rhetoric and crime legislation at the national level trickling down to individual states. In this article I examine how key elements of the contemporary carceral state emerged in the Sunbelt South between 1954 and 1970, focusing on North Carolina as a test case. My argument is that the emergence and early development of state-level carceral policy was the product of the governance of Sunbelt capitalism in the wake of challenges to the Jim Crow order, specifically Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the broader civil rights movement.Footnote 8 This article advances this argument through three central claims.
First, the developments I detail originate in the changing structure of capitalism in the South after WWII. I argue that significant aspects of carceral policy in the region were the result of changes in the structure of the southern economy and how that economy was governed. In the postwar decades, a new political elite, the self-termed “southern moderates,” became the primary architects of a dramatic transformation in the structure of southern capitalism. Southern moderates—a loose coalition of politicians, policymakers, media and business elites, and middle-class white citizens—were eager to see the South into the modern era. By the close of the 1970s, they had transformed much of the region from an overwhelmingly agricultural economy to a metropolitan Sunbelt economy complete with diversified industry and labor markets; new sources of capital and commerce; suburb-rich cities; and centers for research, science, and industry. As Sunbelt capitalism became the dominant economic model in the region, southern states became increasingly linked to new sources of capital from northern and western states, Europe, and parts of Asia—a dynamic that greatly influenced their approach to race in the civil rights era.
Second, while some southern politicians committed to ever more conservative defenses of Jim Crow in the tumultuous wake of Brown and the civil rights movement, I demonstrate that moderate policymakers’ capitalist interests led them to advance a peculiarly liberal variant of law-and-order politics. Drawing from Naomi Murakawa's theorization, I use the term liberal law and order to capture how the moderates’ popularization of law-and-order politics adhered to the principles of postwar racial liberalism.Footnote 9 Unlike conservative law-and-order ideology, which imagined African Americans to harbor a biological predisposition toward crime, liberal law-and-order politics operated via a language of racial neutrality, advocated for the eradication of racial extremism and extra-legal violence, and sought remedies for what it called the social origins of crime. Here, I identify state responses to Brown and the civil rights movement as important sites of liberal law and order's emergence in the Sunbelt South. In the mid-1950s, southern moderates articulated their post-Brown school policy of token desegregation as the law-and-order curative for two kinds of racial extremism: the “lawless” white massive resistance movementFootnote 10 and the “disorderly” National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Likewise, in the late 1950s and 1960s, when concerns over school policy yielded to concerns over white anti-integration violence and the growing activism of the civil rights movement, moderates responded with law-and-order rhetoric designed to contain both. For moderates, white violence, black “disorder,” and a wide range of social ills produced by overtly discriminatory laws threatened to undermine the Sunbelt South's progressive image and its transition to a diversified industrial economy. Liberal law-and-order politics cohered, in other words, as the Sunbelt's new political elite articulated white and black lawlessness as twin threats to their economic and political goals: to protect the flow of capital into the region, to secure de facto segregation as a stable feature of the Sunbelt South, and to manage their image as the guardians of modern southern progressiveness.
Third, I argue that southern moderates’ law-and-order politics, forged in the aftermath of legal and grassroots challenges to Jim Crow, became the basis for early carceral development in the Sunbelt South. Moderate policymakers argued that the rampant problems of extremism, civil disorder, and crime required the implementation of a tough yet race-neutral crime policy. In this article I focus on three areas of state-level crime policy that underpinned the early development of the carceral state in the Sunbelt South: growing state criminal codes, anti-juvenile-delinquency measures, and law enforcement policy. In postwar North Carolina, for instance, moderate policymakers greatly expanded the state criminal code to criminalize the high crimes of the Klan and (far more broadly) the tactics of the civil rights movement; created a the Youth Service Committee, which targeted juvenile delinquency in areas underemployment and urban unrest; and established the Governor's Committee on Law and Order, a major research and policymaking institution for riot control and law enforcement policy. Significantly, as I detail throughout the article, several of these and several other state-level policy developments in North Carolina were fused with federal welfare, anti-delinquency, and “war on crime” legislation in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. In sum, this article demonstrates how racial and capitalist interests in the Sunbelt South, liberal law-and-order politics, and partnership with federal welfare-cum-crime initiatives constituted an important origin point of carceral development in the United States.
Rethinking U.S. Carceral Development
The construction of the U.S. carceral state is the result of a complex set of economic, political, and institutional processes. Its development is long and multilayered, not the result of a single factor, institution, political party, or flurry of punitiveness. In focusing on state-level politics and policy in the South between 1954 and 1970, this article seeks to uncover an important origin point of state-level carceral development, thus advancing our understanding of how the U.S. carceral state was constructed in several respects. First, my attention on the Sunbelt South advances our understanding of how forces of race and capitalism combined to impact the political development of the American state. This focus builds on the foundational work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Loïc Wacquant, Marie Gottschalk, and others who argue that race and capitalist interests intersected to produce more expansive penal institutions in the late twentieth century.Footnote 11 But while these scholars analyze neoliberal governance as a peculiar generator of carceral institutions, in this article I focus on an earlier and more regionally specific instantiation of American capitalist development. The Sunbelt economy, stretching from the Southwest to Florida, grew incredibly rapidly in the post-WWII decades and was marked by a huge influx of populations to cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Phoenix; diversifying labor markets; an ethos of modernity and progress; and the growth of the defense, oil, aerospace, research, and other industries.Footnote 12 Critically, both Sunbelt capitalism and the emergence of carceral policy in the South preceded the generalized assault on the public sector and the retrenchment of welfare that defined the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. As such, my attention to Sunbelt capitalism reveals relationships of race, capitalism, and carceral policy until now left largely uninvestigated in American political development literature.
Second, in unearthing the role that the Sunbelt's political elite played in building the carceral state, I substantially revise scholarly understandings of the relationship between midcentury crime policy and southern racial politics. As already noted, the rise of law-and-order politics and the subsequent ballooning of the U.S. carceral system are often understood to emanate from the machinations of (mostly southern) racial conservatives. In focusing on conservative law-and-order politics, however, previous scholarship has missed how moderate southern politicians with material links to northern capital, political links to northern liberal elites, and ideological links to the principles of postwar liberalism were central architects of carceral policy. In this regard, I build on the valuable research of Naomi Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton, who separately argue that northern liberals, in building the social welfare programs of the Great Society, also “policed the Great Society” with a barrage of federal crime and law enforcement policy that criminalized black communities as hotbeds of delinquency, civil disorder, and lawlessness.Footnote 13 In my analysis, the phenomenon of what Murakawa refers to as liberal law and order was also present in the Sunbelt South. This suggests that scholarship emphasizing southern conservatism as the main driver of law-and-order politics and carceral policy overstates its case. I find instead that there were strong lines of regional convergence between northern liberals and southern moderates, both in the popularization of liberal law-and-order politics and the creation of carceral policy.
Third, my analysis demonstrates that African American organizing and social movements were part and parcel to the development of carceral policy. As Megan Ming Francis argues, “the pattern of black protest leading to an expansion of civil rights and the subsequent contraction of these very rights through state-sanctioned violence is durable and it is integral to the way the American political system has developed.”Footnote 14 In the case of carceral policy in the Sunbelt South, the expansion and contraction of black civil rights occurred nearly simultaneously. As I document, southern moderate policymakers proscribed white terrorism and passed liberal reforms to state and local law enforcement, but they also worked to quietly curtail the realization of black rights by describing civil rights advocates as “lawless” and “disorderly” and passing ostensibly race-neutral policy to police black leaders, criminalize movement tactics, surveil poor black populations, and grow the state's policing and carceral structures. Key aspects of carceral policy's emergence in the Sunbelt South were the result of moderates’ resistance to legal and grassroots activism for black civil rights.
Finally, though most scholarship on mass incarceration focuses on national-level politics and federal policy, individual states are in fact important sites of carceral development in the United States.Footnote 15 In fact, the bulk of crime policy has been passed at the state level, and state correctional facilities house the overwhelming majority, some 87 percent, of incarcerated individuals today.Footnote 16 More research is required to trace the growth of carceral policy in individual states and analyze their relationship to the development of national policy. This article is in part an effort to do just that. What I find is that carceral policy did not flow uniformly from the federal government to the states but was also produced at the state level, suggesting a complex web of carceral development in the postwar era.
North Carolina as a Case Study
I center my study on the state of North Carolina, treating it as a test case in the emergence and early development of carceral policy in the postwar South. North Carolina is a useful case study for several reasons. First, it is representative of the region's economic and political transformation after WWII. Like much of the rest of the South, North Carolina was a heavily agricultural state well into the twentieth century. The state's agrarian economy centered on three industries (tobacco, textiles, and banking) and lacked the infrastructure to support a more diversified economy. Facing a dire economic crisis in the postwar decades, North Carolina policymakers worked very hard to cultivate contracts with business located outside of the state, to support the influx of new industry, and to grow labor markets in manufacturing and research. While politicians throughout the South sought new sources of capital, North Carolina's Sunbelt economy was a matter of long-term state policy throughout the 1950s and 1960s. For one thing, the vast majority of North Carolina's political elite, including a succession of governors from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, was moderate. This meant that the political elite for the most part did not suffer divisions in governance between conservative and moderate factions that plagued other southern states.Footnote 17 So while Sunbelt capitalism ultimately transformed the economic structure of much of the South, it arrived early and remained stable in North Carolina throughout the postwar era, making that state a valuable test case for what was to come in the region.
Second, North Carolina is useful as a case study because it reveals how the governance of Sunbelt capitalism impacted racial politics, and specifically racial politics during the civil rights era. During this period North Carolina was home to several Sunbelt cities dependent on the influx of northern capital and a moderate political elite that largely condemned the overt racism that dominated Deep South states. In place of crass white supremacist politics, North Carolina moderates pioneered a very different kind of resistance to insurgent black rights that focused on maintaining segregation by what they called a “lawful approach.” For example, as I will detail in a later section, their post-Brown school policy and the law-and-order language that attended it was so successful in maintaining segregation without defying the Supreme Court's decision that other southern states looked to North Carolina's school policy when their massive resistance laws began to fail in the courts.Footnote 18
Third, North Carolina was a pioneer of carceral policy in the postwar era. As I document in detail, between 1954 and 1970 North Carolina witnessed the emergence of liberal law-and-order rhetoric, augmented its investigative and law enforcement agencies in both size and scope, substantially revised and expanded its criminal code, and increased its capacity to police and incarcerate juveniles. As the state's carceral policies expanded, its prison populations rose significantly, and by the late 1970s its incarceration rates were at historic and often national highs. That these rates were soon thereafter well within the national norm suggests that North Carolina is an important test case in the early development of state-level carceral policy in the South.
Finally, North Carolina is a valuable case for analyzing how state-level carceral policy developed in relationship to national crime policy. North Carolina's expanding carceral policy often fused or coincided with the passage of similar policies under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, especially in the areas of juvenile delinquency and law enforcement. Analyzing these links in the emergence of North Carolina and national crime policy reveals potential lines of research into the complex intertwining of national and state-level policy development.
The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. To begin, I describe the arrival of Sunbelt capitalism in North Carolina and outline its relationship to race, segregation, and law-and-order politics. I then document how these Sunbelt interests prompted moderates to popularize liberal law-and-order politics in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Finally, I discuss how liberal law-and-order politics after Brown and during the civil rights movement impacted the development of the carceral state in North Carolina. I focus on three policy areas: expanding state criminal codes, juvenile delinquency measures, and law enforcement policy. Throughout the article, my analysis draws primarily on the politics and policies spearheaded by a succession of moderate North Carolina governors whose administrations spanned the postwar period: Luther Hartwell Hodges (in office 1954–1961), Terry Sanford (in office 1961–1965), and Daniel K. Moore (in office 1965–1969). I also draw on various archival materials, including speeches, newspaper articles, commission reports, and legislative records.
GOVERNING SUNBELT CAPITALISM
The Arrival of Sunbelt Capitalism
Law-and-order politics and carceral policy cohered not primarily in North Carolina's rural regions, but in the rapidly growing, capital-rich cities of the Sunbelt—cities like Charlotte, Raleigh, and Durham. At the helm were a coalition of southern moderates (politicians, business elites, and middle-class white citizens) who, as journalist Calvin Trillin accurately remarked, were both violence-averse segregationists who “had never been caught throwing a rock at a Negro” and individuals who “valued something more than segregation—business.”Footnote 19 These three preferences—Sunbelt capitalism, segregation, and anti-extremism—together formed the basis for North Carolina's turn to liberal law-and-order politics and carceral policy by the end of the 1960s.
The midcentury southern moderate stood at a point of vast economic transition in the region. Jim Crow capitalism was in crisis in the midcentury decades. As late as the early 1950s, vast portions of southern state economies were dependent on a crumbling plantation system and troubled cotton markets, and southern workers were dependent on either low-wage agricultural work or mill labor.Footnote 20 But during WWII, nationalized production structures, contracts with northern industry, and corporations opening regional offices and manufacturing plants in the South not only introduced a newly corporate economic structure to many southern states, but also prompted a shift in political power from the depleted rural-agrarian strongholds of the Democratic Party to growing Sunbelt cities.Footnote 21 As the postwar decades wore on, these cities came to look far more like northern ones, both in their relationship to twentieth century industry and commerce and in their patterns of residential segregation.Footnote 22 As historian Matthew Lassiter explains, moderates became the “clear fulcrum of political power” in the South by the end of the civil rights decades, and their rise allowed the “postindustrial Sunbelt economy to emerge as the dominant method of social organization” in the region.Footnote 23 After centuries of agrarian dominance and single-party white authoritarian rule, this was indeed a significant restructuring of the southern order.
North Carolina was at the forefront of Sunbelt capitalism. As far as the state's moderate political elite was concerned, North Carolina's primary problem was its dependence on a crumbling agricultural economy (specifically, over-reliance on tobacco and textiles) that held back economic progress and stood in the way of the attainment of what they sometimes termed—recalling Henry W. Grady's term for postbellum industrial development—the “New South.”Footnote 24 As North Carolina Governor Luther Hartwell Hodges recalled of his administration, which spanned the late 1950s: “My administration was considered by many to be ‘industry hungry.’ It was!”Footnote 25 To ensure that North Carolina would attract capital, Hodges lowered corporate tax rates, shored up the state's right-to-work laws, used state law enforcement to stamp out labor organizing, and went on what he termed “industry-hunting expeditions” to northern cities and western Europe designed to entice companies to open plants in North Carolina.Footnote 26 Beyond this, Hodges reinvigorated the Department of Conservation and Development, expanding its reach and leadership to buttress industrial development and outside investment in the state. Among its projects, the department founded the Business Development Corporation, which consolidated state efforts to secure the influx of industrial plants and other resources from northern corporations; the Small Industries Plan, which provided support and contacts for local entrepreneurs; and the Research Triangle Project, which lent state backing to the development of a large business-minded “research park” between the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, each of which boasted a large university.Footnote 27 As historian James Cobb has noted, Hodges called upon his legislature and state officials to give their “full support and cooperation” to the department and urged them to, in Hodges's words, employ a “smile and warm welcome” to any industrial prospector to keep “selling” North Carolina.Footnote 28
It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which the Sunbelt South's growing dependence on outside investors and national markets influenced its advocates’ approach to race, and particularly their response to Brown and the civil rights movement. By the mid-1950s, the majority of southern states had launched a strident massive resistance movement against school desegregation seeking to nullify the Supreme Court's decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power” and hosted several highly visible episodes of anti-black violence in response to civil rights activism.Footnote 29 Southern moderates recognized these developments as threats to the emerging Sunbelt economy. Defiance of federal courts and spectacular scenes of racial violence, they feared, would disrupt the flow of northern investments into the region, endanger the class interests of white professionals, interfere with the success of the emergent moderate political elite, and worse still, invite federal intervention into southern states. Moderates across the South voiced these concerns. For instance, Mississippi Governor J.P. Coleman explained his approach to race to a group of potential New York investors in 1956, “We've adopted the motto, ‘Anything offensive to industry is offensive to us and must be removed from the picture.’”Footnote 30 The Mississippi governor, alongside fellow midcentury moderate governors such as North Carolina's Luther Hodges (1954–1961), Terry Sanford (1961–1965) and Daniel Moore (1965–1969), Tennessee's Frank Clement, Florida's LeRoy Collins, and Georgia's Carl Sanders, consciously rejected entrenching massive resistance tactics, viewing them as barriers to securing contracts with northern investors and thus the influx of capital and jobs to their states. In the words of one northern journalist, the “growing middle class” in the South is “a factor of stability, a check on the back-country people, among whom the mob spirit has been endemic.”Footnote 31
But if the threat of “back-country” mobism was palpable, continued segregation itself was not, on the logic of southern moderates, a barrier economic development. By all accounts, white southerners, whether moderates or conservatives, preferred a continuation of the Jim Crow order. Even as Hodges, Coleman, and their moderate brethren identified the blunter tactics of white supremacy as politically and economically dangerous, they maintained that racial segregation was vital to the stability of the New South and its primary constituency: middle-class whites who were quickly filling the bourgeoning Sunbelt cities. However, the means by which that preference was accomplished was certainly a potential problem. If segregation was seen to cause public disorder, racial upheaval, and violence rather than promote growth and stability, moderates worried, states would risk injuring southern state economies as they attempted to integrate into nationalized corporate-capitalist structures. Far from conflicting projects, Sunbelt capitalism and racial stratification went hand in hand, and together formed the backdrop to the emergence of liberal law-and-order politics in the South.
Sunbelt Capitalism and the Politics of Law and Order
What I mean by law-and-order politics demands refinement. At the broadest level, law and order refers to what Stuart Scheingold termed “the politicization of crime” in midcentury American politics.Footnote 32 This is not to suggest that respect for “law” and public “order” were not important prior to midcentury (they were), nor is it to suggest that the issue of crime did not intersect with race before the emergence of law-and-order politics (it did).Footnote 33 Nevertheless, “law and order” only became a serious political rhetoric and policy formation in the middle of the twentieth century, and the real question is why and in what way it was politicized at this juncture of American political history. This is an especially difficult question when there were so many sources of crime's politicization across the political spectrum. Even in the midcentury South, the idea of crime control and the terminology of “law and order” were deeply contested. Hard-line conservatives and southern moderates, though they both routinely leveraged the language of “law and order,” disagreed on a number of premises: who could speak for it, what constituted its violation, its precise relationship to school integration and black civil rights, and its preferred policy prescriptions. As such, not just when it emerged but what particular ideational form it took requires explanation.
Conservative law-and-order politics, popular with hard-line segregationists and advocates of the massive resistance movement, sprung from the idea that African Americans were predisposed toward lawlessness and crime.Footnote 34 Faced with mounting legal and grassroots challenges to the southern racial order in the 1950s and 1960s, southern conservatives eagerly applied this logic in an effort to reestablish the prerogatives of white rights long protected by Jim Crow. As Vesla Weaver has documented, white southern conservatives routinely argued that “civil rights and integration would portend a crime wave by bringing violence-prone blacks to white neighborhoods.”Footnote 35 North Carolina Assistant Attorney General I. Beverly Lake, the state's most prominent conservative in the 1950s, advanced this logic. Lake argued that Brown, by “forcing” racial integration on white North Carolinians, would create a severe law-and-order problem in the state's schools. Citing the supposedly innate criminality of African Americans and lamenting the impending “mongrelization of North Carolina,” Lake reasoned that “any small percentage of infiltration in white schools by negroes is liable to be very explosive.”Footnote 36 In this regard, Lake was cut from the same cloth as other southern conservatives who likewise defended de jure segregation as a matter of crime control. For midcentury conservatives, strong law-and-order measures were required upon integration because, they imagined, African Americans’ supposed predisposition toward violence would inevitably introduce crime into previously white-only spaces.
In postwar North Carolina, however, conservative law-and-order politics was found only in limited sectors. Far more popular among the state's political elite was what Naomi Murakawa refers to as liberal law-and-order politics. Although most prominent among northern liberals and in national politics, the growth of Sunbelt capitalist interests made liberal law-and-order rhetoric, politics, and ultimately policy popular in North Carolina. Liberal law and order was (and remains) ideationally moored in racial liberalism, a formation of political thought that holds that racial discrimination is fundamentally incompatible with the American Creed, that government policy should be race neutral rather than racially preferential, and that the government should intervene to protect individual citizens from overt race-based discrimination and violence.Footnote 37 As Murakawa explains, in the shadow of the growing civil rights movement, these principles led midcentury liberals to establish “a law-and-order mandate: build a better carceral state, one strong enough to control racial violence in the streets and regimented enough to control racial bias in the criminal justice administration.”Footnote 38 Most fundamentally, then, midcentury liberal law-and-order politics offered formal racial neutrality as an antidote to a range of social ills that included discrimination, white violence, and crime. In this way, the proponents of liberal law and order (northern liberals and southern moderates alike) rejected the conservative belief that criminality derived from race and likewise condemned white extra-legal violence as backwards, “extremist,” and criminal.Footnote 39 They were strongly in favor of enlisting the power of the state to remedy racial prejudice in and beyond the criminal justice system through the introduction and careful regimentation of race-neutral laws, procedures, and practices.
At the same time that the proponents of liberal law and order determined that white violence and discrimination were violations of the American Creed, they still worried about “lawlessness” and crime in black communities. This was a problem they defined as socially rather than biologically moored. Though precise arguments varied, most liberals and southern moderates accepted that anti-black violence and discrimination created warped pathologies in African Americans, led to civil disorder, and fomented the conditions of crime. In fact, they routinely identified racial discrimination as an important factor in the generation of juvenile delinquency and crime. High levels of civil disorder and crime in black neighborhoods, they argued, were “a product of white social engineering,” the result of generations of discrimination, disadvantage, and poverty.Footnote 40 In this way, the proponents of liberal law and order, despite their commitment to formal racial neutrality, often invoked race in their explanation of the presence of crime. Elizabeth Hinton explains this seeming contradiction this way: “Even if their legislative language never evoked race explicitly, policy-makers interpreted black urban poverty as pathological—as the product of individual and cultural ‘deficiencies.’”Footnote 41 As we will see, this thesis led northern liberals and southern moderates to define crime expansively and pass broad measures to contain what they saw as the lawlessness endemic in black communities. Indeed, a broad range of behavior and activities from civil disobedience and mass uprisings to petty and violent crime were understood to be part of a dangerous matrix of criminal behavior—all the socially derived pathology of poor, mostly black, “urban” communities.
In sum, for midcentury southern conservatives, crime derived from blackness itself, but for the proponents of liberal law and order, the “crime problem” included both white supremacist violence and a broad range of activity in black communities produced by the state's failure to adhere to race-neutral standards. In this regard, liberal law-and-order politics racializes differently than does its conservative counterpart—not by way of old-fashioned scientific racism, but by way of a liberal critique of scientific racism that nevertheless makes civil rights “disorder” and crime the twin pathologies of African American, particularly urban, communities. Carceral policy in North Carolina derived principally from liberal, not conservative, articulations of the need for law and order.
In what follows, I trace the popularization of liberal law and order in North Carolina's Sunbelt politics, first in the immediate wake of Brown v. Board of Education and then during the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and 1960s. It was, I argue, southern moderates’ Sunbelt interests that prompted them to denounce conservative law-and-order tactics as dangerous to the arrival of extra-regional capital and instead cultivate liberal law and order as an antidote to disorder and crime. As I show, the liberal law-and-order politics cast up in North Carolina not only became popular among the Sunbelt elite as a way to secure new form of capital for the state, but also infused state-level carceral policy passed by moderate-dominated legislature in the areas of crime, juvenile delinquency, and law enforcement.
BROWN AND THE EMERGENCE OF LIBERAL LAW-AND-ORDER POLITICS
Crime was not a significant generator of liberal law-and-order politics in North Carolina at midcentury, though it would come to impact later phases of its development in the 1960s. Rather, liberal law-and-order politics was produced through debates over race, segregation, and civil rights as North Carolina moderates strove to secure Sunbelt growth amid legal and grassroots challenges to the existing racial order. In this section, I analyze North Carolina's strategic response to Brown v. Board of Education as a significant, early site of the emergence of liberal law-and-order politics in the Sunbelt South. In this regard, Brown is significant not as a legal precedent or symbolic milestone, but because it comprised, as Robert Mickey puts it, a “complete disruption to financial and administrative arrangements” in the South and thus forced southern policymakers (conservatives and moderates alike) to innovate policy responses to the decision.Footnote 42 Policy responses ran the gamut. While some politicians committed to hard-line or “massive resistance” defenses of segregation after Brown, the economic and racial interests of North Carolina's moderate coalition prompted them to innovate school policy that formally complied with the Supreme Court yet retained sky-high levels of segregation. It was in the moderates’ post-Brown policy response, I argue, that liberal law-and-order politics began to cohere in North Carolina. State moderates articulated their post-Brown school policy as the law-and-order curative to two kinds of racial extremism: the massive resistance movement and the NAACP. Largely by way of this newfound political discourse, North Carolina secured for itself the mantle of the progressive, business-minded Sunbelt South—a decided alternative to the violence, lawlessness, and defiance that afflicted other southern states. In short, North Carolina's call for increased, race-neutral law-and-order governance became synonymous with its image of pragmatic desegregation, capitalistic growth, and Sunbelt progressivism. In this way, the purpose of this section is to identify an important site of law and order's early coherence in state politics and to account for the particular ideational form it took on in North Carolina.
Law and order did not emerge already fully formed and coherent in Sunbelt politics. The moderate coalition's law-and-order politics began with Brown and the language of (what they called) “lawfulness” or “lawful compliance” with the Supreme Court decision that quickly developed into full-blown “law and order” rhetoric that actively displaced competing arguments from the state's conservative faction. From an early date, Governor William Umstead (in office 1953–1954) and his successor, Luther Hodges, advocated compliance with Brown. Shortly after the decision, Umstead released a statement expressing his “terrible disappointment” with Supreme Court but also making clear that North Carolina was a “lawful state.”Footnote 43 Umstead's restrained response was echoed in many parts of the state. The Greensboro Daily News, for example, greeted the news of the Supreme Court's decision with a call for moderation: “The Negro race has moved rapidly to take its rightful place in the mainstream of the nation. But these extremists on both sides—the Talmadges and the NAACP—should remember the moderate views held by most Southerners.”Footnote 44 Referencing the extremism of Georgia's segregationist governor, Herman Talmadge, who declared that the Supreme Court had reduced the Constitution to “a mere scrap of paper” and the NAACP's integrationist agenda, the North Carolina newspaper called for the moderation proposed by Umstead.Footnote 45 Indeed, the terminology of “extremists on both sides” would come to structure both debates over how to respond to Brown and, later, calls for the adoption of carceral policy.
But in 1954, what counted as “lawfulness” and “compliance” with Brown was deeply contested between the moderate coalition and massive resistance factions in the state in the months immediately following the decision, even in so moderate a state as North Carolina. For instance, in their amicus brief for Brown II (1955), Attorney General Harry McMullan and Assistant Attorney General Lake argued that Brown should not be implemented at all. Racial integration, they argued, was a forerunner of violence and unrest: “We must know, however, that even any small percentage of infiltration in white schools by negroes is liable to be very explosive and disrupting to the operation of the public schools and the peace and order of society in the community in which this occurs.”Footnote 46 McMullan's language here, especially where he places the burden of violence and its forestallment, is telling. On his logic, African Americans advocating for integration will “infiltrate” white schools, an act that would prove “explosive” and disruptive of the “peace and order of society.” Racial integration, for conservatives like McMullan, was a law-and-order issue because black students brought violence to white schools.
Despite the attorney general's fiery rhetoric, the fallout from Brown was already beginning to trend in a more moderate direction in North Carolina's political leadership. In fact, the moderate path to law and order was set relatively early as governors Umstead and Hodges tarred McMullan, Lake, and other racial conservatives as “lawless” and “extremist.” Umstead sought to discredit the arguments of the attorney general's office and innovate school policy that would not defy the courts, instigate violence, or scare away industrial contracts. The governor convened the North Carolina Advisory Committee on Education, popularly known as the Pearsall Committee after its chair, lawyer and former state Speaker of the House Thomas Pearsall, for this purpose. The Pearsall Committee's stated objectives were the “preservation of public education in North Carolina” and the “preservation of the peace throughout North Carolina.”Footnote 47 But as I show, the Pearsall Committee also helped forge the state's path toward liberal law-and-order politics.
The first step in this process was the passage of the Local Option Law in 1955. In this campaign, the Pearsall Committee offered pupil assignment as the moderate and lawful alternative to “lawless” and “defiant” massive resistance schemes of the attorney general's office. In December 1954, The Pearsall Committee submitted its report to the state's new governor, Luther Hodges. It recommended that the state legislature repeal all school laws requiring segregation, thus formally complying with the Court, and that the state transition the assignment of students in public schools to local districts. Arguing that “the enrollment and assignment of children in the schools is by its very nature a local matter,” the committee recommended “complete authority over these matters should be vested in the county and city boards of education. With such authority local school boards could adopt such plans, rules and procedures as their local conditions might require.”Footnote 48 By way of pupil placement based on “local conditions” and procedures rather than race itself, the state could claim compliance with Brown while maintaining de facto separate schools.
By March 1955, the North Carolina General Assembly had outlawed the state's dual education system and implemented each of the committee's objectives.Footnote 49 North Carolina's Pupil Assignment Plan passed in the General Assembly with little fanfare and even less public resistance, but nonetheless became the groundwork for dichotomizing moderate “lawfulness” against massive resistance's “lawlessness,” which would blossom into full-blown law-and-order rhetoric a few short months later. North Carolina moderates did not rest easy after the successful implementation of pupil assignment, but sought to protect their legal strategy with additional legislation. Liberal law and order was forged in part in this campaign. As North Carolina embarked on its second round of school policy changes in mid-1955, the state's political leadership effectively threatened its citizenry with “integrationist” and white massive resistance violence should they not accept further moderate school measures. This second round of school policy included two policies drafted by the Pearsall Committee. First, the committee recommended a Local Option Law, which would allow local school districts to close schools by popular referendum in the event that school integration (allowed by way of transfers under the 1955 Pupil Assignment Law) created an “intolerable situation” in the schools. Second, it recommended a “tuition grant” law that made state funds available for private schools should local public schools close under the Local Option.
The Pearsall Plan went before the voters in the form of a single amendment in September 1956, at a time when many southern states began to embrace massive resistance laws with increasing enthusiasm. For Governor Hodges and much of the state's media and business elites, the Pearsall Plan was the law-and-order alternative to impending white intransigence once schools inevitably began token desegregation set to take place the following fall. To start, the Pearsall Committee prophesied the rise of racial tensions should the state not adopt its moderate plan: “We are in a very dangerous situation.…The steady and healthy progress which we have been making for more than half a century in the betterment of our racial relations has been suddenly stopped. Now the tide is running the other way. Racial tensions are mounting in North Carolina every day.”Footnote 50 A few months later, Hodges emphasized the need to keep “strong emotions” in check: “Feelings run understandably strong in a matter of this kind. Emotions are frequently stronger and more powerful than thought and reason…. We must keep the peace if we are going to keep the schools. This is a time for calmness and courage. We need council rather than inflammatory headlines.”Footnote 51 In August, Hodges put an even finer point on the dangers of not fully implementing moderate school policy with the statement that should the state fail to adopt the moderate policy presented by the Pearsall Committee, it would descend into chaos, with “white citizens of this state” resisting integration evermore “strenuously, resourcefully, and probably with growing bitterness.”Footnote 52
In reality, massive resistance forces in North Carolina at this juncture were rather weak, especially in comparison to other southern states. Nevertheless, the Pearsall Committee, Governor Hodges, and many in the state legislature worked very hard to present the Pearsall Plan as the moderate and law-and-order corrective to the growing restlessness of massive resistance forces prone to unlawful defiance of the federal courts, embarrassing displays of white violence, and dangerous “extremism on both sides.” As North Carolina neared its special election vote for the Pearsall Plan, scheduled for September 8, 1956, state moderates turned ever more fully to the language of “law and order” to persuade voters. Early in the campaign, Governor Hodges emphasized North Carolinians’ lawfulness and moderation. In one speech, Hodges described the Pearsall Plan as a rational middle road between two dangerous types of extremism: “Some have attempted explosive and quick answers—this taking the form of defiance of the Supreme Court—with the extreme right abandoning our schools at any mention of integration, while the extreme left clamors for mass integration.”Footnote 53 For the state's moderate elite, both white massive resistance forces and African Americans pushing for desegregation were framed as similarly “explosive” and “lawless”—the two extremes that only the moderates’ plan could rein in.
Indeed, for the state's moderate leadership, these were two primary threats to the passage of the Pearsall Plan: African Americans seeking integration and whites advocating massive resistance. Moderates increasingly articulated both as “extremist” groups that were antithetical to race-neutral law and order. For instance, in his campaigning for the Pearsall Plan, Governor Hodges articulated black integrationist activism as a form of public disorder. North Carolina, Hodges declared, was a unique home to the “friendly relationship of mutual helpfulness [between whites and blacks] which has been a great pride to all of us and the object of praise from throughout the nation.”Footnote 54 However, this mutually “helpful” relationship was under attack by black civil rights forces. Hodges cautioned North Carolinians against what he called the “militancy” of the NAACP:
In spite of this outstanding record of good race relationships here in North Carolina, we are being made the object of a campaign by an organization which seems determined to destroy our interracial friendship and divide us into camps of racial antagonism. This organization is known as the NAACP…. The policies formulated by leaders of this organization tend to create the only kind of situation in which an organization such as it is can survive—that is, one of distrust, antagonism, resentment and confusion.Footnote 55
By arguing that the NAACP introduced antagonism and resentment into North Carolina, Hodges suggested that a program of “voluntary segregation” would be beneficial for African American citizens. “Do not allow any militant and selfish organization to stampede you into refusal to go along with this program I am proposing in the interest of our public schools; take pride in your race by attending your own schools,” Hodges urged.Footnote 56 Moreover, his complaints of the organization narrated the realization of black rights as disruptive to public peace. On this logic, the activism of the NAACP both disrupted currently harmonious race relations and constituted a dangerous source of public “antagonism” and disorder.
Hodges also argued that black integrationist activism would incite violent white backlash. In particular, the narrative that white massive resistance forces would import unabashed violence and mob rule into North Carolina (and thus invite harm to Sunbelt capitalism and unwanted federal intervention) became a central and winning narrative in the state. To make this claim, North Carolina's political leadership and news media turned to ongoing school crises in Clinton, Tennessee and Mansfield, Texas, both of which involved massive resistance violence that drew significant national attention. In August 1956, white anti-integration violence broke out in Clinton and Mansfield after local schools desegregated, both in response to court orders in suits filed by the NAACP on behalf of local black families. In scenes that would fill national newspapers with images of white mobs, massive resistance forces in both cities attempted to bar small numbers of African American schoolchildren from entering previously all-white schools, tussled and hurled insults at black passersby, and carried signs declaring their preference for continued segregation.Footnote 57 Both cities endured several days of racial unrest and rioting and hosted segregationists from other states who came for support.Footnote 58
North Carolina moderates had long derided defiance of federal courts as a disgrace to the South, but as the state began to debate the implementation of the Pearsall Plan, the politics of defiance took on new life as a lesson in the kind of disorder and lawlessness massive resistance could foment. Clinton and Mansfield became touchstones of massive resistance violence against which moderates articulated their law-and-order curative. In one of his more explicit appeals, Governor Hodges called the Pearsall Plan the “law and order” alternative to racial unrest and violence:
Events of the last few days included riots and near violence in Texas and Tennessee are very disturbing and we hope such things are not repeated here. I have been asked in the last few days if I thought these other States which are having difficulty would have been in a better position if they had the protection or guarantees such as are offered in the Pearsall Plan. My answer is “yes.” The trouble in these States (and it could happen in North Carolina) is that they don't have legislation or safety valves which protect them against forced mixing of the races. Under such conditions people are inclined to take things into their own hands disregarding law and order. We don't want that to happen here! Our plan offers the people a legal and orderly method of handling it to mix races.Footnote 59
Pointedly suggesting that white violence and racial trouble “could happen in North Carolina,” the governor provided a law-and-order solution to racial extremism and violence, leveraging it as a heightened state interest in the face of potential racial unrest. Without the Pearsall Plan to help secure segregation without running afoul of the federal courts, Hodges lamented, people would resort to “lawlessness” and tend to “take the law into their own hands.”Footnote 60
North Carolina newspapers also began to declare their support for the Pearsall Plan on liberal law-and-order terms. While many newspapers emphasized their support for keeping schools open and applauded legal compliance with Brown, these themes were largely conflated with law-and-order rhetoric. The Durham Daily Sun, for example, pledged its support in an editorial: “Whatever the fate of the plan in the courts—and there are able attorneys who believe that both the federal constitution and the wishes of the majority of North Carolina's people will be met through the plan—the state will be feeling its way through legal channels rather than with gun and tank.”Footnote 61 Similarly, the Greenville Daily Reflector advocated moderation as lawful alternative to violence, stating, “The Reflector supports the plan as giving citizens legal solutions to local integration problems rather than risking the alternative of possible confused violence.”Footnote 62 And the Concord Tribune pledged support to the Pearsall Plan because it would spare North Carolina “an ugly situation such as occurred at Clinton, Tennessee…. And it will, if the people remain calm, patient, understanding, and follow the leadership of Governor Hodges.”Footnote 63
On September 8, 1956, North Carolinians voted overwhelmingly in support of the Pearsall Plan, and it was implemented into law soon after. In the autumn of 1957 North Carolina faced its first token desegregation in Greensboro, Charlotte, and Winston-Salem. The liberal law-and-order rhetoric that had emerged in the immediate wake of Brown held fast as Hodges cautioned against any breach of public peace: “We do not like lawlessness. We want no agitation in our State from the Ku Klux Klan, or from the NAACP. We want no outsiders, Negro or white, meddling in our affairs. We will make our choices; and I am confident that we will make them in a reasonable, lawful and orderly manner, as befits true North Carolinians.”Footnote 64 Uniting the Klan with the NAACP around the twin concepts of lawlessness and violence, Hodges situated white moderates as the sole protectors of race-neutral law and order. The victory of the Pearsall Plan rested in no small part on the displacement of competing conservative law-and-order rhetoric proffered by McMullan and Lake. In particular, North Carolina moderates’ winning rhetoric relied heavily on creating a clean distinction between racial violence and race-neutral law and order: White violence and mob behavior were the distained territory of massive resistance whites, and the NAACP was dangerously “extremist” and “disorderly.”
In the end, the distinction between North Carolina's school policy and massive resistance policy was, although legally meaningful, a decidedly false one, as racial segregation remained almost wholly intact in the state until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and residential segregation, based as much on socioeconomic class as race, flourished in the state's Sunbelt cities.Footnote 65 North Carolina moderates’ real victory, however, lay in their ability to lay claim to the mantle of southern progressiveness and industrial growth during a period when massive resistance states suffered losses on both fronts. For instance, in the process of successfully maintaining high levels of racial segregation, North Carolina moderates also succeeded in garnering respect from the national press as, in the words of the New York Times, a “southern peacemaker” and gaining contracts with northern capital.Footnote 66 Hodges, for one, was deeply cognizant of the relationship between his state's handling of Brown, the national press, and Sunbelt capitalist growth. As he recalled in his 1962 autobiography of his years as governor, fittingly titled Businessman in the Statehouse, he took every opportunity available to talk up North Carolina's commitment to “token integration … without any trouble or disorder” to the business community and the national press.Footnote 67 On an “industry-hunting expedition” to New York in June 1956, for instance, Hodges eagerly distributed copies of his New York Rotary Club speech on North Carolina's “lawful” handling of segregation to all area newspapers and press associations.Footnote 68 Hodges's strategy paid off. In 1957, the very year that North Carolina desegregated its first schools, Hodges secured contracts to open several new industrial plants in North Carolina, some homegrown and some from northern states.Footnote 69 That same year, the Little Rock Nine crisis cost Arkansas several business contracts along with its image as a moderate southern state. By contrast, North Carolina's image as a legally compliant, racially neutral, and law-and-order state was integral to its cultivation Sunbelt capitalism.
This section has demonstrated how the invocation of “lawfulness” and “law and order” protected North Carolina's progressive image and Sunbelt interests in the uncertain aftermath of Brown. In these years, some of liberal law and order's central principles—race-neutral law and anti-extremism—emerged as a primary vehicle to secure Sunbelt growth. In this way, post-Brown school policy debates constituted a fulcrum of liberal law-and-order politics in North Carolina, but it would also take on an expanded and more complex form in the late 1950s and 1960s as moderate policymakers encountered the fresh challenges of the civil rights era. Next, I document developing liberal law-and-order strategies of southern moderates, pinpointing how they informed the rapid development of carceral policy through 1970. In the process, I also highlight the relationship between these developments and crime policy, particularly in the areas of juvenile delinquency and law enforcement, emerging on the national level.
CARCERAL STATE DEVELOPMENT IN THE SUNBELT SOUTH
In midcentury North Carolina, “law and order” was not mere rhetorical flourish. As we have seen, in the aftermath of Brown, moderates crafted liberal law-and-order politics designed to smooth the implementation of Local Option and the Pearsall Plan. But in the late 1950s and 1960s, debates over school desegregation gave way to heightened racialized threats to the emergent Sunbelt economy. Some of these threats took an explicit form. For instance, organized white terrorism, including official membership in the Klan, increased dramatically in North Carolina in this period. As did the civil rights movement, which from the nonviolent sit-in movement to Robert F. Williams's insistence on armed resistance to the mass uprisings of the late 1960s, entered a period of open and insistent revolt against the Jim Crow order. Just as they had in the immediate post-Brown years, moderates identified both white violence and black civil rights activism as mirror-image threats to the realization of Sunbelt capitalism in North Carolina. But as we shall see in the cases of juvenile delinquency and law enforcement policy, the specific concerns of Klan violence and black “disorder” also fused with other concerns about the origins of crime, delinquency, and social upheaval that likewise (moderates feared) threatened the stability of Sunbelt capital interests.
In the remainder of the article, I document how North Carolina moderates’ law-and-order response to the problems of Klan violence and black civil rights activism fused with other aspects of liberal law and order, namely, liberal theories of the origins of crime and strategies for crime control offered at the national level by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Unbound from its early roots in school policy debates, by 1970 liberal law-and-order politics became a fully-fledged strategy of governance in the Sunbelt South. To achieve stable functionality as a growth-minded, business-centered, and, above all, modern southern state, North Carolina politicians during this period embraced a full range of liberal law-and-order strategies designed to contain violence in the streets and eliminate the sort of racial discrimination and biases that, they argued, produced problems of crime and disorder in black communities. Crime policy and the administration of criminal justice became the central sites of these strategies. In what follows, I focus on three policy areas in which North Carolina's law-and-order governance underwrote significant carceral expansion: state criminal codes, anti-juvenile-delinquency measures, and law enforcement.
“A Firm Policy”: The Expanding Criminal Code
Beginning in the late 1950s the moderate coalition's commitment to Sunbelt growth manifested in a decided expansion to North Carolina's criminal code. Since WWII, North Carolina's criminal code (Chapter 14 of the General Statues) has expanded by leaps and bounds. Between 1943 and 2011, the state's criminal code nearly doubled, going from 411 to 765 sections—a ballooning that does not even include the addition of drug laws, which are located in a separate chapter of the General Statues. By far, the largest quantitative jump in Chapter 14 occurred between the crucial years of 1951 and 1969, when the legislature added 125 sections to the criminal code.Footnote 70 By comparison, the code expanded by fifty-five sections between 1970 and 1986, and by only fourteen sections between 1987 and 1999.Footnote 71 While these data underscore the quantitative growth of the criminal code during these crucial postwar years, it does not reveal where that policy expanded or what political forces might have contributed to it. In this section, I discuss important areas of targeted expansions to Chapter 14. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the North Carolina legislature passed a slew of laws that, on the one hand, criminalized certain terroristic acts of the Ku Klux Klan and, on the other hand, the everyday tactics of the civil rights movement. Although the former constituted real racial violence and the latter an effort to democratize the South, moderates in the statehouse articulated both to be equally dangerous violations of race-neutral law and order. As with the popularization of liberal law and order in the post-Brown years, many of these expansions to the state criminal code were not primarily about fighting a “crime problem,” but were rather a logical extension of the state's law-and-order governance of Sunbelt capitalism into crime policy.
Criminalizing White Extra-Legal Violence
The moderates’ political and economic goals were of critical importance in the late 1950s and 1960s precisely because several forces threatened to undermine the state's progressive image upon which Sunbelt capitalism depended. Particularly disastrous for North Carolina's image was the increasing prominence of extra-legal violence of the Ku Klux Klan. Long a peripheral organization in North Carolina, membership in the Klan surged suddenly in the early 1960s, shattering records. As historian David Cunningham notes, while “deadly violence in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia had garnered the lion's share of klan publicity,” by the mid-1960s “the United Klans’ real stronghold was in fact North Carolina, long considered the region's most progressive state.”Footnote 72 Of the reported membership of the United Klans of America (UKA) of 25,000 in 1965, upwards of 10,000—or an astonishing 40 percent—resided in North Carolina.Footnote 73 Fearful that this upsurge in Klan membership and accompanying violence would damage North Carolina's image in the eyes of a watchful world, upending capital's march into the state, state policymakers moved to contain its activities in part by expanding the state criminal code.
The prominence of the UKA in North Carolina greatly concerned the moderate coalition. Governors Hodges, Sanford, and Moore all sought to suppress the tactics and the visibility of the organization. For instance, North Carolina made headlines in 1958 when the Klan held a large, armed rally in Maxton, a small town near the South Carolina border. The rally itself was not especially newsworthy, but when more than 500 members of the nearby Lumbee tribe launched an armed attack against Klan members at the rally led by James “Catfish” Cole, the press and state leaders took notice.Footnote 74 Moreover, they knew whom to blame for the violence. Maxton's chief of police stated, “We do not approve of the Klan and would like to discourage its activity as much as possible.”Footnote 75 In a press release, Governor Hodges placed responsibility for the violence directly on the “irresponsible and misguided” Klan members. In the wake of the Lumbee attack, the General Assembly passed four additions to Chapter 14 in an effort to curtail well-worn tactics of the Klan. In 1959 alone, the General Assembly created special punishments for arson of public buildings, made it unlawful to use a false bomb or call in false bomb threats, outlawed the use of threats over the phone, created mandatory minimum punishments for the possession of explosives, and outlawed membership in secret societies and the burning of crosses on another's land without “first getting written permission.”Footnote 76 Other legislation targeting the known tactics of white vigilantism followed in subsequent years. In 1963, the General Assembly passed S.B. 179, making it unlawful to maliciously throw corrosive substances; in 1965, H.B. 1043 made it unlawful to burn schoolhouses; and in 1967, H.B. 51 outlawed the willful damage of occupied property with explosives.Footnote 77
But North Carolina's criminalization of the UKA and the activities of white vigilantes was only partly about controlling crime. More fundamentally, it was an effort to suppress white supremacist vigilante terrorism, quell racial disorder inside state lines, and manage the state's image on the national stage as it strove to develop contracts with extra-regional capital. Notably, moderate politicians utilized the rhetoric of “lawlessness” and “illegality,” popularized initially during the Pearsall campaign to describe the massive resistance movement, to narrate the crimes of the UKA. For instance, in the wake of increased Klan activity in the mid-1960s, Hodges's successor, Governor Terry Sanford, denounced the growth of the Klan in the state on liberal law-and-order terms:
Because there is a growing concern across the state, I think it is necessary to remind the people involved that the Ku Klux Klan is not going to take over North Carolina. Taking the law into their hands, running people away, burning crosses, making threats, wearing hoods, are all illegal practices and are not going to be permitted.… Let the KKK get this clear. I am not going to tolerate their illegal actions, and the people of North Carolina are not going to put up with it. I repeat, the KKK is not going to take over North Carolina.Footnote 78
Here, Sanford articulated the crimes of the Klan as a problem of law and order—that is, a problem of Klan members “taking the law into their own hands” and thus “tak[ing] over North Carolina.” Importantly, Sanford underscored the Klan's “lawlessness” as unrepresentative of “the people of North Carolina.” Despite the upward swing in UKA membership that motivated the speech, Sanford represented North Carolinians as a population fundamentally apart from and against white supremacist violence. This is an important formulation, for it names racial liberalism as an essential characteristic of North Carolina—a political disposition that was far more common in the statehouse and in metropolitan, capital-rich centers of Charlotte, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh than in the more conservative rural parts of the state where UKA membership was higher. At base, Governor Sanford's complaint about the Klan was its failure to adhere to developing colorblind norms. The Klan's real crime in this formulation was its incivility, its lawlessness, and its supposed misrepresentation of the “real” North Carolina, not its systematic impact on the targets of its terror or its relationship to the state's own segregationist goals.
Of further importance, Sanford also made clear in his speech the use of state investigative and law enforcement agencies in the pursuit of colorblind law and order: “The SBI [State Bureau of Investigation] has been asked to keep a running investigation,” Sanford cautioned, adding, “The State Highway Patrol is being instructed to watch for violations. Local law enforcement officers should also watch for violations. Superior Court solicitors have the responsibility for bringing the indictments, and I am sure they will do so where they uncover violations.”Footnote 79 Like Hodges before him, Sanford made clear that a correct use of law enforcement powers in the state is to contain Klan violence.
When Daniel Moore assumed office in January of 1965, he continued Hodges's and Sanford's efforts to manage Klan activity via another expansion of Chapter 14. In 1967, the state legislature passed explicitly anti-Klan legislation, addressing continued Klan activity ranging from membership rallies to systematic anti-black intimidation to outright violence.Footnote 80 At the urging of Governor Moore, the state house enacted H.B. 149, “Regarding Secret Societies and Activities,” which outlawed hooded robes and masks, cross burning, intimidation, and the galvanization of unlawful activities among Klan membership.Footnote 81 This supplemented previous legislation, written by the state solicitor general under Luther Hodges, which had already outlawed cross burning and membership in secret societies. H.B. 149 failed to specify legal punishment for Klan membership or tactics, and there is ample evidence that local law enforcement routinely looked away from Klan activities.Footnote 82 Nevertheless, anti-Klan legislation joined a broader effort at the level of the state to control the high crimes of avowed white supremacists through expansions to the criminal code and, in some instances, the dedication of state police to control Klan rallies. The liberal law-and-order strategies employed here inhered from Luther Hodges and Thomas Pearsall's efforts to contain massive resistance forces in the wake of Brown.
Criminalizing the Civil Rights Movement
Even as they outlawed the high crimes of dedicated white supremacists, North Carolina moderates also passed new sections of Chapter 14 designed to criminalize the everyday, nonviolent political behavior of black civil rights activists and black use of public space. As moderates saw it, both white vigilante violence and black civil rights activism violated the state's commitment to anti-extremism, progressivism, and business development. Governor Moore, in a particularly succinct version of this sentiment in the wake of a clash between Klan members and voting rights advocates in the town of Plymouth, North Carolina, in 1965, stated: “I deplore the activities of certain members of the Klan who offer nothing constructive for the good of North Carolina. I also deplore the activities of the extremists in the civil rights movement who seem to be seeking publicity over a completely superfluous issue—that of voter registration.”Footnote 83 As Moore's statement reveals, while the actions of the Klan were “deplorable,” the civil rights movement was the far larger target of the state's growing carceral apparatus in part because moderates identified a far broader range of black behavior as disorderly, lawless, or criminal. But we should be careful not to conflate moderate policymakers’ responses to the civil rights movement with crass racial conservatism. As I document in this section, the same constellation of liberal law-and-order strategies honed against the NAACP in the wake of Brown informed the passage of new sections of the state criminal code dedicated to criminalizing the civil rights movement.
A series of grassroots challenges to the Jim Crow order in North Carolina increasingly thrust the state into the national spotlight—a dynamic that moderate politicians sought to contain in part through expansions to the criminal code. North Carolina was fertile ground for civil rights movement activism. In 1957, Reverend Douglass Moore, in partner with the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), led the state's first sit-in at a segregated ice cream parlor in Durham. Three years later, in 1960, four black A&T University students refused to leave the all-white lunch counter at Woolworth's department store in Greensboro, sparking the sit-in movement that spread like wildfire across the entire region and drew the national spotlight to North Carolina (A&T University is the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University). Later that year, Ella Baker founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in Raleigh and she was instrumental in organizing the Freedom Rides in 1961. In 1962, the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) used pickets and direct action protest to desegregate drug stores in Durham. In these years, Robert F. Williams garnered significant national attention as president of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina. Williams led successful efforts to desegregate Monroe's swimming pool and public library, and he argued that these victories were due to his strategy of armed self-defense, a theory he published in his 1962 book, Negroes with Guns. North Carolina was also the site of more impromptu protest and uprisings. In 1967, the beating of a black man, who later died from his injuries, while in police custody set off a four-day uprising against the violent tactics of white police officers in the still largely segregated city of Winston-Salem. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 sparked mass protest and rioting across the country, including in North Carolina. And in 1969, officials of an all-black segregated school in Greensboro nullified the results of a school council election because the winner was active in the Black Power movement, sparking a multiday uprising that spread to the nearby A&T University campus. As these brief snapshots suggest, black activism—from nonviolent sit-ins to armed self-defense and mass uprising—was strong in North Carolina and often laid important groundwork for civil rights organizing in other parts of the country.
As with Klan activity, civil rights activism greatly concerned North Carolina moderates, and for similar reasons. Evidence of white and black “extremism,” moderates feared, threatened North Carolina's image as a racially progressive, capital-friendly, and modern southern state. These interests prompted state moderate elites to employ liberal law and order as a strategy to contain black civil rights activism. Consider, for instance, the moderates’ response to the sit-in movement. The “Greensboro Four,” composed of students at A&T University, first sat down at Woolworth's lunch counter on February 1, 1960. When the all-white establishment refused to serve them the coffee they ordered, the four remained until the counter closed that evening, only to return the following day with reinforcements. They endured heckling and taunting from white patrons, passersby, and Klan members who arrived on the scene. On February 3, sixty students, nearly all of them from A&T University, arrived to nonviolently occupy the lunch counter; on February 4, that number had swelled to 300. By the week's end, students in Durham, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Winston-Salem began staging sit-ins at their local lunch counters. From there, the sit-in movement spread rapidly to cities across the South as civil rights and student groups organized locally.Footnote 84
The moderate coalition feared the movement's impact on North Carolina's image, and moved to criminalize the movement as a violation of race-neutral law and order. For instance, the Raleigh-based News and Observer lamented the progress of the sit-in movement, and especially the attention it was garnering outside of the state, writing: “The picket line now extends from the dime store to the United States Supreme Court and beyond that to national and world opinion.”Footnote 85 It is notable that the News and Observer cited the sit-in's impact on “national and world opinion.” As with school policy a few years earlier, the North Carolina press was deeply cognizant of how the treatment of African Americans in North Carolina was perceived beyond the state. North Carolina's ascent from its over-reliance on agriculture depended in no small part on encouraging northern and European companies to open plants and regional offices in North Carolina, and the perception of racial turmoil presented a threat to these contracts.
Meanwhile, Governor Hodges's administration looked on in disapproval. In the wake of the initial sit-ins, Hodges held a press conference to denounce the sit-ins as “counterproductive and a threat to law and order,” and his new attorney general, Malcolm Seawell, asserted that the students were causing “irreparable harm” to race relations in the state and repeatedly urged Woolworths to “invoke anti-trespass laws and arrest the demonstrators.”Footnote 86 While black activists had a right to seek services and Woolworths the right to operate their business as they saw fit, Seawell explained, the community at large also had “the right to see that peace and order are maintained, including the premises of any retail establishment if conditions in that establishment threaten the peace and good order of the community.”Footnote 87 The attorney general then offered to help municipalities tighten trespass ordinances. The A&T students responded to Sewell in an open letter: “For the past few days, you have strongly advocated the use of the ‘no trespass law’ on the part of the business establishments involved. It is highly evident that you have failed to realize the vast devastating effect this could have on the state of North Carolina…. It is a known fact that industry tends to shy away from those areas where there is racial unrest.”Footnote 88 The Greensboro Woolworths, in consultation with its headquarters in New York, elected to temporarily close the lunch counter and enter negotiations with the students rather than invoke criminal trespass laws. Soon, however, the North Carolina General Assembly would make it far easier for law enforcement to enforce trespass laws in sit-in demonstrations. Hodges's successor Terry Sanford signed into law legislation criminalizing the central tactic of the sit-in movement. H.B. 1311 (1963) strengthened criminal trespass laws to include occupation of private businesses “after being forbidden,” thereby easing the ability of state and local law enforcement to arrest nonviolent demonstrators.Footnote 89
North Carolina's new anti-trespass law was part of a general strategy to criminalize the civil rights movement on liberal law-and-order terms. Frustrated that sit-ins and other civil rights protests continued under his watch, Governor Sanford invited civil rights leaders to the Capitol for a meeting in June 1963. Sanford began by emphasizing the various ills set in motion by slavery. “Your enemy and mine,” Sanford stated, “is a system bequeathed us by a cotton economy, kindled by stubbornness, intolerance, hotheadedness, north and south, exploding into war and leaving to our generations the ashes of vengeance, retribution, and poverty.”Footnote 90 Sanford then counseled 150 civil rights activists and leaders in attendance to abandon demonstrations and embrace “reason:”
These mass demonstrations also had reached the point where I, as head of the executive branch of government, responsible for law enforcement, peace and order, was required to establish a firm policy for North Carolina. My responsibility for public safety required that I take action before danger erupted into violence. I do not intend to let mass demonstrations destroy us. I hope you will not declare war on those who urge courses of reason at this time.Footnote 91
The liberal law-and-order notes in Sanford's statement are clear. Importantly, Sanford identified the “cotton kingdom,” or slavery, as the common enemy of African Americans and the state's moderate leadership, and he lamented its continued impact on the “intolerance” and “hotheadedness” of whites and “retribution and poverty” of blacks. But for Sanford, the solution to the twin problem of white hotheadedness and black retribution was a “firm policy” of public safety—or, more bluntly, the absence of black protest, uprising, or demonstrations that might lead to “war.” Sanford's articulation of civil rights activists as violators of public safety built directly on his predecessor's description of the NAACP as “lawless” in the post-Brown debates. For Hodges and Sanford alike, the retributive nature of black civil rights bled into a capacious definition of criminality for African American citizens.
Stanford's statement before North Carolina's civil rights leaders in 1963 was indicative of a trend in state-level crime policy. By the end of the 1960s, the state legislature had criminalized several tactics of the civil rights movement. As legal scholars Derrick Bell and Stephen Barkan have separately noted, state legislatures across the South responded to the sit-in movement by passing new laws designed to outlaw its tactics.Footnote 92 As Barkan describes it, “the entire legal machinery of the South became a tool for the social control of civil rights protest.”Footnote 93 North Carolina was no exception, but its use of liberal law-and-order politics to achieve this end is notable. The General Assembly already began laying the groundwork in 1959, when it levied taxes “to meet the expenses of suppressing riots or insurrections or in handling any extraordinary breach of law and order.”Footnote 94 By the close of the following decade, Chapter 14 held several new sections that criminalized the tactics of civil rights activists beyond H.B. 1311. H.B. 563 (1965) made “demonstrations or assemblies of persons kneeling or lying down in public buildings” a misdemeanor offense.Footnote 95 H.B. 134 (1969) increased the maximum punishments for such demonstrations.Footnote 96 H.B. 802 (1969) restricted the presence of private citizens on public university campuses during curfews.Footnote 97
Finally and most substantially, H.B. 321 (1969), titled An Act to Clarify the Law Relating to Riots and Civil Disorders, outlawed several activities relating to (and far afield from) the civil rights movement. These include rioting, inciting a riot, disorderly conduct, failure to disperse, looting, trespass, assault of emergency or law enforcement personnel, possessing a weapon of mass destruction, curfew violations, and the authority of the governor in a declared state of emergency.Footnote 98 This weighty piece of legislation also established a hierarchy of misdemeanor and felony charges for “willfully engaging in a riot” or other act of civil disobedience.Footnote 99 H.B. 321 served as legal grounds for the surveillance of civil rights groups and more generally, African American communities. The scope of these additions introduced a capacious definition of civil rights protest as criminal behavior to the North Carolina criminal code, lending institutional weight to the proscription of black activism.
In sum, moderates understood both white racial violence and black civil rights activism as mirror-image violations of race-neutral law and order. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, their efforts to criminalize both added substantial bulk to Chapter 14. It also secured North Carolina's image as a modern, law-and-order southern state and protected the development of Sunbelt capitalism in the state. Throughout this era, liberal law-and-order expansions to Chapter 14 protected the moderate elite's economic and political goals: to safeguard the state's progressive image, secure the influx of diversified capital, and publicize, in the words of Governor Sanford in 1965, “that North Carolina has what it takes, and that we have a growing state, a state where you can make a profit, a state where industry can do well.”Footnote 100 Significantly, the moderates’ governance of Sunbelt capitalism via the expansion of the state criminal code flowed from the complex of liberal law-and-order strategies initially cast up by Luther Hodges and Thomas Pearsall in school policy debates after Brown. A subsequent generation of moderate governors and policymakers drew on key principles of liberal law and order—racial neutrality, anti-extremism, and business development—to contain the high crimes of the Klan and police the everyday tactics of the civil rights movement.
“The Seeds of Crime:” Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime Policy
In the first days of January 1961, Governor Terry Sanford delivered his inaugural address, outlining his vision for North Carolina. He praised the state for shedding the “shackles of inadequate capital” that had held the state's economy back for decades, commended his predecessor, Luther Hodges, for paving “the road to industrial development” and “steering” the state through “threatened storms of racial strife.” But Sanford's vision of a modern North Carolina extended beyond industry and education:
We are not going to forget the modernization of our programs for penal institutions and juvenile correctional institutions. We are not going to forget, as we move forward into the challenging and demanding years ahead, that no group of our citizens can be denied the right to participate in the opportunities of first-class citizenship. Let us extend North Carolina's well-known spirit of moderation and good will, of mutual respect and understanding.Footnote 101
As Sanford's language here suggests, North Carolina's spirit of industrial growth and racial “moderation and good will” became increasingly intertwined with its approach to criminal justice in the postwar decades. North Carolina moderates made calculable if tentative strides toward racial equality in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, the state began hiring African Americans to policy boards and as staff in public offices, desegregated its police forces and prisons, eradicated race altogether from its General Statutes, and launched a biracial Good Neighbor Council whose aim was to reduce employment discrimination and offer job training services to underemployed populations. North Carolina's emphasis on race-neutral laws and social equality programs indicates that the “high tide” of postwar liberalism permeated the Sunbelt South.Footnote 102 At the same time, however, aspects of these changes also became seedbed for expansions to the state's growing carceral apparatus.
In this section, I investigate a second aspect of state-level carceral development in midcentury North Carolina: juvenile delinquency and youth crime policy. I detail how North Carolina moderates’ commitment to making the state hospitable to Sunbelt capital and industry prompted them to modernize and expand its juvenile justice system. Liberal law-and-order politics—particularly liberal theories of crime control in the Kennedy administration that targeted the social origins of crime—underpinned an unprecedented expansion of North Carolina's juvenile justice system in the postwar decades. Recall that in addition to their stance against racial violence and extremism, the proponents of liberal law and order advocated for racial neutrality and the uniform application of law and policy. Critically, they argued that decades of white violence and racially discriminatory laws and policies generated higher rates of crime in urban, poor, and mostly black communities. For instance, at fault for juvenile delinquency, many experts and policymakers in the Kennedy, Hodges, and Sanford administrations agreed, were systemic problems that encouraged a culture or “pathology” of delinquency to develop in black communities. As we will see, North Carolina moderates took up these arguments in full, which fused with indigenous articulations of “law and order” forged in the post-Brown school debates to underwrite a decided expansion of anti-delinquency measures in the state. In this way, national policy like Kennedy's 1961 Youth Crime Control Act contributed centrally to state-level policy expansions in North Carolina.
In some ways, North Carolina's turn to juvenile delinquency policy in the 1950s and 1960s is unsurprising. Nationwide, the post-WWII decades witnessed increasing emphasis on the problem of “juvenile delinquency.”Footnote 103 In the immediate postwar years figures like FBI director J. Edgar Hoover were instrumental in creating a nationwide panic that the country was in the midst of a “wave” of youth crime. In 1946, Hoover diagnosed juvenile crime as a rampant problem for postwar America in a lengthy New York Times opinion column: “America is in the grip of a rising wave of crime.… Present-day crime involves youthful participants. Youngsters who fell into evil ways early in the war are contributing heavily to today's violence.”Footnote 104 The U.S. Children's Bureau agreed, stating in 1952 that “a ‘junior crime wave’ has struck the nation and is threatening to become a ‘tidal wave.’”Footnote 105
In North Carolina, Governor Luther Hodges sought to mitigate public panic about juvenile delinquency, stressing that it was a “national” problem that had yet to arrive in the Tar Heel state.Footnote 106 At the same time, however, the Hodges administration sought to modernize aspects of the juvenile correction system, which it saw as disjointed, poorly administrated, inefficient, and out of date. In 1955, Governor Hodges convened a committee to study juvenile delinquency in North Carolina, out of which was born the Governor's Youth Service Committee (YSC).Footnote 107 The YSC was the first statewide committee tasked with coordinating “all agencies with programs designed to curb, control, and correct juvenile delinquency,” making “recommendations to the Governor as to necessary legislation for the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency and the supervision, training, care, correction, and treatment of juvenile delinquents,” establishing standards for juvenile court judges, and consulting with “officials and counties and cities for the purpose of encouraging regional detention homes, juvenile courts and other facilities for the treatment of juvenile delinquency.”Footnote 108 This broad set of tasks prompted YSC's board to offer wide-ranging recommendations in its final report, published in 1957. Among those that the General Assembly ultimately took up were the creation of a state-supported system of “domestic relations” courts, increased training and professionalization of personnel in state-run “youth training schools” (North Carolina's term for what would in the following decade take on the more modern label of juvenile correctional facilities), and the establishment of additional youth treatment centers.Footnote 109 By the end of Luther Hodges's term as governor, juvenile delinquency had become a central concern for state policymakers, one they readily communicated to the public.Footnote 110
Treading in the new policy direction forged by Hodges, Governor Terry Sanford greatly expanded North Carolina's carceral system in the area of juvenile corrections in the 1960s. Liberal theories of crime and delinquency and developments in national crime policy, specifically the Kennedy administration's Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961, contributed to this growth. The Youth Offenses Control Act, the nation's first federal crime policy, embodied midcentury liberals’ approach to crime. Kennedy's Youth Offenses Control Act was built around the logic that racial discrimination and white violence created the conditions of crime in black communities. For instance, the preamble to the act stated that “delinquency and offenses are increasing in both urban and rural communities … [and] occur disproportionately among school dropouts, unemployed youth faced with limited opportunities and with employment barriers, and youth in deprived family situations.”Footnote 111 Further, the problems of underemployment and racial discrimination “require intensive and coordinated efforts” on the part of the federal government.Footnote 112 The law, though it worked with a relatively small three-year annual budget of $10 million and funded only sixteen programs nationwide in its first year, nevertheless “unified law enforcement and social welfare services” by giving state governments and local organizations funding create or augment existing juvenile delinquency programs.Footnote 113 Indeed, the Youth Offenses Control Act was not meant to stand alone in its fight against juvenile delinquency, but to work in tandem with what Kennedy called a “massive upgrading” of social programming in the areas of public education, vocational training, and literacy programs that would “focus explicitly on African Americans and other groups who had been excluded.”Footnote 114
Liberal theories of juvenile delinquency and crime likewise penetrated policymaking in North Carolina in the 1960s. This is particularly the case with North Carolina's Good Neighbor Council, without question the state's most visible commitment to racial equality in the 1960s. Convened by Terry Sanford in August 1963 and made a formal state agency by Governor Daniel Moore in 1967, the council's twofold mission was to eradicate discrimination in hiring and employment and “urge youth to become better trained and qualified for employment.”Footnote 115 Tellingly, Sanford chose to announce the creation of the council on the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation—an anniversary marked in more awesome fashion by the 1963 March on Washington. Sanford's timing was meaningful. As the governor put it in his announcement of the council at a meeting of the North Carolina Press Association, “The American Negro was freed from slavery one hundred years ago.… Now is the time not merely to look back to freedom, but forward to the fulfillment of its meaning.”Footnote 116 Employment, Sanford diagnosed, was the way to achieve the goal of African American freedom, and this required that North Carolinians “quit unfair discrimination and … give the Negro a full chance to earn a decent living for his family and to contribute to higher standards for himself and all men.”Footnote 117 Sanford and the Good Neighbor Council drew immediate praise. The NAACP endorsed the council, which was biracial, and Roscoe Drummond of the Christian Science Monitor heralded the Sanford administration as “a voice of moderation and challenge” in the South.Footnote 118 A year into the program, fifty-five local municipalities had created their own local Good Neighbor Councils on the prompting of Sanford, and the council would in the 1970s grow into a primary organization for fair employment in the state.
At the same time, however, the Good Neighbor Council's dedication to racial equality in hiring and firing practices was linked to another purpose: youth crime control. Instead of tackling the problem of employment discrimination through civil rights legislation, as demanded by many civil rights leaders, the Sanford administration framed it as an anti-delinquency measure.Footnote 119 Delinquency was not articulated in the council's founding documents, nor was it in the 1967 Senate bill that made the program a formal state agency. However, as Sanford made clear, the council's primary goal of bettering the employment prospects of African Americans would help prevent the spread of juvenile crime:
I have recently established the North Carolina Good Neighbor Council whose mission is to urge youth to become better trained and qualified for employment and to encourage the employment of qualified people without regard to race.… While the Good Neighbor program is not primarily directed toward the prevention of crime and delinquency, this will be an important consequence of its success.Footnote 120
For Sanford, black underemployment, thanks to discriminatory hiring and firing practices, fueled what he referred to as the “seeds of crime.”Footnote 121 He explained: “We should place the greatest stress upon programs designed to stop the growth of criminality as close to the seed stage as we can get.”Footnote 122 In this sense, the Good Neighbor Council was part of a broader effort on the part of North Carolina moderates, and particularly the Sanford administration, to prevent “crime and delinquency” at the level of employment. Thus at the state level, initiatives to foster racial equality were rooted in part in the assumption that African Americans’ lack of economic opportunities caused disorder and delinquency, especially among youth. Such disorder, for North Carolina's moderate leadership, required more equality, less civil rights protest, and more crime control.
Indeed, according to the Sanford administration, “crime and delinquency” were on the rise in North Carolina. “Each year,” he warned in a 1964 speech, “we see the number of law violators increasing at a more rapid rate than our population is growing.… We are faced with the high probability of a further rise in crime rates.”Footnote 123 Citing a prison population that had doubled from under 6,000 to more than 12,000 since the Second World War, Sanford painted a pathologized picture of lawlessness: “The overwhelming mass of law violators are vocationally unskilled, mentally or emotionally impaired, alcoholic, or simply socially untrained.… They need help to develop the vocational and social skills and the self-control required for law-abiding life in a free society.”Footnote 124 The problem was particularly dire for youth, explained Sanford, whose “home and community inadequacies contribute to the development of juvenile delinquency.”Footnote 125 The clear intimation here is that poor and black communities were rife with social and economic disorder, their inhabitants undisciplined and lawless. This diagnosis underpinned the Good Neighbor Council's anti-employment discrimination programming, but also fused with liberal law-and-order politics and state-level crime policy in the 1960s.
Perhaps ironically, one of Sanford's stated goals for his term as governor was to reduce the state's prison and juvenile correction population.Footnote 126 Yet Sanford's racialized fears of the “socially untrained” and “vocationally unskilled” helped power developments in state-level crime policy. Kennedy's Youth Offenses Control Act played an important institutional role in these developments. In an address to North Carolina's Patrol Board in 1963, Sanford announced that the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime would help fund one of the Good Neighbor Program's main initiatives, the establishment of a Training Center on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime at the University of North Carolina's Institute of Government.Footnote 127 Through this relationship, the Good Neighbor Council formalized its programming as in part an anti-crime measure. The Training Center was dedicated to concentrating “resources, knowledge, staff, and facilities on a long-range basis for the training of all categories of personnel who work with youth.” According to Sanford, the aim of the Training Center was to uphold the administration of justice in three ways: “first, the swift, certain, and impartial imposition of sanctions against law-breakers … second, the provision of proper controls for those who are unable to live a law-abiding life in a free community … [and] third, a concern with developing self-control among those who break the law.”Footnote 128 In the address, Sanford praised the federal government for working closely with “local endeavors” to study and curb juvenile crime: “This is a commendable example of the co-ordination encouraged nationally by the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime and in this state by a committee I have appointed to promote the same purposes. By coordinating these two programs in this way, the immediate and long-range impact of this particular institute is greatly increased. I believe we are here engaged in an endeavor of immense and lasting value.”Footnote 129 Indeed, citing “an inflationary spiral of institutional failure” of the criminal justice system, Sanford viewed the President's Committee, established by Kennedy in 1961, and its funding of the Training Center as an important step to stem the tide of juvenile delinquency in North Carolina.Footnote 130
This complex of state- and national-level anti-delinquency policy had a direct impact on North Carolina's carceral structures. First, after Daniel Moore succeeded Sanford as governor in 1965, the Good Neighbor Council was further integrated into the state's growing carceral apparatus. The council chairperson not only coordinated the efforts of local Good Neighbor Councils, but also sat on the Governor's Committee on Law and Order and on the Law and Order division of the innocuously named Department of Local Affairs, whose central function was to recommend policy to “improve law enforcement and the administration of criminal justice.”Footnote 131 Second, the infrastructure of juvenile corrections also expanded. By 1965 North Carolina's juvenile correctional facilities faced, as Governor Moore put it, a “very serious problem of overcrowding.”Footnote 132 The Moore administration spearheaded the construction of new juvenile correction facilities. In February 1967, the governor announced a $2.8 million allocation for “new construction for the Board of Juvenile Correction.”Footnote 133 In December of that year, Moore congratulated the board on its “strengthened programs to develop delinquent youth into productive citizens” and for starting construction a new juvenile “training school” in Butner, North Carolina, “designed to meet the needs of aggressive and seriously disturbed delinquents.”Footnote 134 That year alone, the number of youth incarcerated in North Carolina juvenile corrections and training schools increased from 14,159 to 17,707.Footnote 135
North Carolina's commitment to building a carceral infrastructure dedicated to juvenile corrections culminated in the late 1960s. In 1968, Moore announced the creation of the Governor's Council on Juvenile Delinquency, signaling moderate leadership's continued commitment to juvenile justice policymaking. In Moore's words, the purpose of the council was to make a “penetrating study” of the “total problem of juvenile crime and correction” and to “evaluate juvenile correction services in North Carolina and to recommend any changes which may be indicated to lead to a more efficient and effective delivery of services for the prevention, control, and treatment of juvenile delinquency.” As the number of juvenile “training schools” grew, so did the state funding for juvenile corrections. In 1957, North Carolina administered five juvenile training schools, for which the General Assembly appropriated just over $1.1 million.Footnote 136 By contrast, in 1968 the state administered eight juvenile training schools, for which the General Assembly appropriated $4.9 million. This expansion included a new Juvenile Evaluation Center in Asheville (established in 1961, based one of YSC's 1957 recommendations) and the new Training Center at University of North Carolina's Institute of Government (at Chapel Hill).Footnote 137 By the 1970s, North Carolina's youth inmate population had grown so large that the state built four additional juvenile correctional centers: Western Youth Institution (1972), Sandhills Youth Center (1973), Fountain Youth Center (1976), and Morrison Youth Institution (1977).
As this section has demonstrated, state- and national-level juvenile justice policies combined to dramatically expand North Carolina's carceral system in the postwar decades. Critically, liberal theories about the social origins of crime, especially as they manifested in the Good Neighbor Council, helped shape this policy development. Principally concerned with the growing Sunbelt economy and North Carolina's image as a progressive southern state, moderates’ liberal law-and-order politics here encompassed more than the straight curtailment of racial extremism and violence through additions to the criminal code. It also involved the development of juvenile crime policy and infrastructure based on the assumption, shared by liberals at the national level, that youth crime flourished due to racial discrimination and “cycles” of joblessness and poverty in black communities. In this regard, as the Kennedy administration's conception of crime control came to roost in North Carolina, the terms of liberal law-and-order politics in the Sunbelt South expanded beyond the articulation set in the immediate aftermath of Brown.
“Uniform Justice:” The Expansion and Professionalization of Law Enforcement
In addition to the augmentation of the state criminal code and juvenile corrections, the postwar decades also witnessed significant expansion in law enforcement powers in North Carolina. A remarkable portion of this policy passed in the late 1960s. In 1969 alone, for instance, the state legislature augmented law enforcement powers in civil disorders and riots, granted greater powers of arrest to the North Carolina National Guard, established the Police Information Network to heighten the surveillance of citizens, and created the Department of Local Affairs, whose central function was to “assist and participate with State and local law enforcement and the administration of criminal justice.”Footnote 138 At the same time, federal funds for law enforcement began to flow into the state from Title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson's landmark legislation in the War on Crime. At first glance, this flurry of legislation might appear to be the product of a rightward thrust in crime policy in the state. And indeed, expansions to law enforcement were popular among southern conservatives, who had touted their own version of law-and-order politics since the Brown decision. However, when viewed in the longer context of liberal law-and-order strategies and developments in law enforcement policy since the mid-1950s, it becomes clear that what appears as the explosion of conservative action on policing in North Carolina is better understood to be the culmination of a liberal policy development.
In this section, I trace the development of state-level law enforcement policy in postwar North Carolina. I detail how the moderate coalition's liberal law-and-order concerns with managing racial extremism fused with liberal theories of law enforcement and national crime legislation to produce a significant expansion to policing power in the state. First, moderate governors sought to incrementally professionalize and enlarge state law enforcement agencies such as the State Highway Patrol, to oversee school desegregations, and police “extremism on both sides”—visible instances of white terrorism and a wide range of black civil rights activism. Second, through initiatives such as the Committee on Law and Order, moderate policymakers dedicated substantial state resources to the training, professionalization, and augmentation of local law enforcement. Properly trained and well-regulated law-enforcement officers, moderates argued (borrowing, once again, from liberal theories of crime control popular at the national level), could simultaneously help stabilize race relations and reduce crime. Though they differed somewhat in emphasis, the expansion and professionalization of state and local law enforcement in the 1950s and 1960s subscribed to the dream of liberal law-and-order politics: the belief that race-neutral laws, uniformly enforced, would curb white violence, quell black civil rights activism, and reduce crime in North Carolina.
Incremental Expansion and Professionalization of State Law Enforcement
The expansion of law enforcement policy in North Carolina began incrementally in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Recognizing that white vigilante violence and the civil rights movement would dampen Sunbelt progress, Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford moved to both expand and professionalize state law enforcement bodies in North Carolina. First, both administrations sought to expand the powers of the National Guard, the State Highway Patrol, and the State Bureau of Investigation—the three primary state law enforcement agencies in North Carolina.Footnote 139 These agencies responded directly to the governor's office, but held limited powers of arrest and apprehension and had limited training to perform the duties for which they were principally used—mainly in states of emergency, during school desegregation and civil rights protests, and in instances of Klan violence. As in the rest of the South, policing in North Carolina at midcentury was largely a local affair. Law enforcement was decentralized into 370 local municipalities and 100 county sheriff's offices that were largely poorly trained, poorly equipped, and, until the 1960s, uniformly white.Footnote 140 As a locally elected official, the southern county sheriff had a high amount of discretion and could respond chiefly to the interests of the white voters who had placed him in office. The county sheriff was therefore often reluctant to enforce laws unpopular with local constituents.Footnote 141 In this respect, the county sheriff's office in the South in the mid-1950s is perhaps best understood as the policing arm of the Jim Crow order. As Robert F. Williams put it upon being told that he could be escorted home by the local sheriff's office in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1962: “I might as well go with the Ku Klux Klan as go with them.”Footnote 142
In the context of Sunbelt capitalist growth, which hinged in part on North Carolina's progressive image, the traditional discretion of the county sheriff or local police officer presented a challenge for moderate leadership. Governor Hodges, for instance, worried that the sheriffs of conservative counties might contribute to racial conflict. He explained this at the Annual North Carolina Sheriff Association Convention in August 1956: “Treat everyone alike so far as arrest and charges are concerned and deal firmly but fairly with all law violators. The sheriff, though elected by the voters of a single county, is in a sense a State officer. It is his duty to see that the laws of the State are enforced to maintain peace and order.”Footnote 143 Hodges added pointedly, “I know that you are well aware of these facts and will not be false to your trust.”Footnote 144 In the context of post-Brown North Carolina, Governor Hodges's message to North Carolina sheriffs bore a strategic message. By stressing that the local sheriff was in fact a state officer duty-bound to “treat everyone alike” and administer “uniform justice,” Hodges sought to limit the traditional discretionary power of the county sheriff to respond to the interests of local constituents rather than to enforce state law. The enforcement of state law over local preference was of special concern to Hodges in the run-up to the 1956 special election. While the Pearsall Plan won handily that September, that it rebuffed massive resistance politics was not popular in the state's more conservative counties, and the governor sought to enlist local sheriffs in the enforcement of moderate school laws that may spark backlash.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, moderate leadership also succeeded in strengthening the powers of state law enforcement officials. In May 1959 the General Assembly extended the power of arrest to officers of the National Guard in cases of emergency or unrest.Footnote 145 The legislature also introduced regulations to the National Guard to professionalize the service, including tightening qualifications, introducing a written application procedure, and outlining the professional duties of Guard officers.Footnote 146 The National Guard was one of the primary agencies mobilized by the governor's office during school desegregations, in states of emergency, and in cases of civil unrest and disturbance. By establishing the National Guard's power to arrest and professionalizing its officers, the governor's ability to enforce state law was heightened over the necessarily varied political and racial preferences of local constituencies across the state.
More legislation designed to expand and professionalize state law enforcement powers followed under the Sanford administration. In the early 1960s, as the UKA surged to prominence and the civil rights movement gained momentum in North Carolina, the General Assembly granted the governor the power to appoint reserve militia officers in schools, established regulations and training programs for reserve militia officers, outlawed corporal punishment of prisoners in jails and other state correctional facilities, increased the ranks of the Highway Patrol, and gave the governor power to commission “Special police.”Footnote 147 Special police were deputized citizens hired by educational institutions, hospitals, or private companies to provide security for those entities, and they had, as the legislation designated, “all powers of municipal and county police officers to make arrests for both felonies and misdemeanors.”Footnote 148 Last, the General Assembly also gave the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) the authority to “investigate without request” arson, damage, or “misuse” of state-owned property and further authorized the SBI to establish a centralized identification system for use in its investigations.Footnote 149 Both of these measures expanded the power of the SBI to investigate, for instance, civil rights leaders (including students at public universities), members of the UKA, and any others they identified as threats to safety in North Carolina.
This piecemeal expansion of state law enforcement power and attendant professionalization efforts in the late 1950s and early 1960s went hand in hand with the new sections of Chapter 14, discussed previously, to curtail the high crimes of white supremacy and the tactics of the civil rights movement. Together, they increased the reach of the governor to intervene in incidents of racial violence or unrest—incidents that the governor's office deemed the local police to be too poorly trained, too understaffed, or too partisan to deal with. For instance, in the aftermath of the 1958 Lumbee attack on Klansmen, Hodges used the State Highway Patrol to disarm the Lumbee and arrest the reigning Klan Wizard who orchestrated the rally, James “Catfish” Cole. Declaring the UKA to be “lawless … an organization of violence and intimidation,” the governor promised to utilize state law enforcement officers in any instance should local sheriff offices require aid in “maintaining law and order.”Footnote 150 This practice continued through the Sanford and Moore administrations. Upon receiving reports of possible Klan activity at schools scheduled to desegregate in August 1965, for example, Governor Moore met with the heads of the SBI and the State Highway Patrol to make “preparations to assist school officials and local law enforcement officers wherever there appears to be a threat of violence or disorder in the opening of public schools.” He added:
The state of North Carolina is fully prepared to support and assist local law enforcement officers in preserving law and order.… I shall not hesitate to use any power at my command to assure that the public schools of North Carolina will operate in a lawful and orderly manner, and without the threat of violence, disorder, or intimidation.Footnote 151
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, North Carolina's moderate elite routinely used state law enforcement officers to quiet racial violence and unrest that, they feared, would undermine the state's image as a modern, industry-friendly, and racially moderate southern state. These agencies’ expanded powers made up an important arm of the North Carolina's growing carceral mechanisms in this period.
Professionalizing Local Law Enforcement
The incremental professionalization and expansion of the SBI, the State Highway Patrol, and the National Guard laid the groundwork for similar developments in local law enforcement starting in the mid-1960s. 1965 was a watershed year in the development of law enforcement policy in North Carolina. Governor Daniel Moore entered office that January with a pledge to uphold law and order uniformly: “As governor, I shall not tolerate violence or lawlessness anywhere in North Carolina. I shall insist that the law be impartially enforced without fear or favor.”Footnote 152 The governor acted swiftly on this pledge. That fall, Moore created the Governor's Committee on Law and Order (hereinafter, Governor's Committee). Headed by state Attorney General Malcolm Seawall, the committee's stated purpose was to “seek ways to improve respect for the law among all citizens and generally to strengthen law enforcement.”Footnote 153 By 1970, the committee was North Carolina's primary research and policymaking body on law enforcement, civil disorders, and riot control, thus serving an important policing function in the governance of Sunbelt capitalism.
Shortly after forming the committee, Governor Moore appointed Albert Coates, professor of law and founder of the University of North Carolina's Institute of Government, to conduct an in-depth study on how to “improve” law and order and “strengthen” law enforcement in the state.Footnote 154 In what Governor Moore would later call a “monumental document” and the “most comprehensive study of police training in our state” the 1967 Coates Report proposed an “all encompassing training program” for local law enforcement officers, including two- and four-year educational programs in “police science” and guidelines for basic police training for every law enforcement officer in the state.Footnote 155 Moore lauded the Coates Report for its value to professionalizing policing practices, saying: “It has impressed upon us the need for immediate reevaluation and improvement of training efforts, and it has caused us to develop new programs to benefit more officers.… I expect the value of this report will increase with time, for any advancement in the state's effort in law enforcement training should begin with the report prepared by Professor Coates.”Footnote 156 As the governor predicted, the Coates Report's advocacy for educational standards and training programs for all local law enforcement officers became an important touchstone in state law enforcement policy in the late 1960s. Significantly, North Carolina law enforcement policy rested on liberal law-and-order principles popularized in the wake of the Brown decision, but also with national law enforcement policy in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Crime.
On March 8, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson created the Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice in response to what he called a “malignant enemy in America's midst”—crime—and proposed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 (LEAA) to, in Johnson's words, “assist state, local and private groups to improve and strengthen crime control programs.”Footnote 157 With broad bipartisan support, Congress passed LEAA in September 1965. LEAA created the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA) and charged the attorney general with distributing funds to local law enforcement agencies. The funds themselves were fairly small, only $10 million. Nevertheless, according to U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who headed OLEA, the federal program was not designed to simply subsidize local law enforcement, an arrangement he judged to be “undesirable.” Rather, the program was meant to “provide selective support for model programs” in law enforcement and “find ways to do the job more effectively, more efficiently, and with the imaginative utilization of existing scientific techniques.”Footnote 158 In this way, the goal was to advance modern law enforcement policy and scale up particular law enforcement techniques.
North Carolina was a strong supporter of the bill from the beginning, as lawmakers saw it as an extension of the state's approach to law enforcement at the national level. For instance, key support for the bill came from North Carolina Sen. Sam J. Ervin. A member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ervin applauded the bill as a “marvelous idea” akin to University of North Carolina's Institute of Government under the direction of Coates. As Ervin noted in Senate hearings on the bill, Coates regularly invited “law enforcement officers throughout the State to the school where they get lectures from other law enforcement officers and from the attorney general of North Carolina.”Footnote 159 North Carolina moderates and northern liberals agreed, in other words, on the need for more and better law enforcement training, and they enthusiastically supported efforts by state and federal governments to support what they saw as “improvements” in law enforcement.
In addition to heading OLEA, Katzenbach also served as chairperson for the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice and was tasked in July 1965 with examining “every facet of crime and law enforcement in America” and issuing recommendations based on this examination.Footnote 160 The commission's final report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (published February 1967) was itself pivotal in the development of national crime policy in the Johnson administration.Footnote 161 I examine it briefly here because the report's central philosophy was one that North Carolina moderates, especially the Governor's Committee, shared, and because the report itself impacted the development of law enforcement policy in the state.
At the outset, the 340-page Katzenbach Report called for “a revolution in the way America thinks about crime.”Footnote 162 On the report's diagnosis, the primary problem with the American criminal justice system as it stood in the mid-1960s was that it was ill-suited to solve the very problem—crime—it sought to contain.Footnote 163 Liberals in the Johnson administration believed that by establishing race-neutral laws and regulations, improving the training of police officers, and simply dedicating more state resources to the professionalization of police, law enforcement agencies would simultaneously reduce crime, restore law and order, and relieve some of the pressures that led to racial uprisings and unrest in the first place. This was undoubtedly a tall order, and Katzenbach's clarion call could hardly have come at a more significant time. In 1967, the year the report was published, fears about rising crime and racial uprisings permeated the national consciousness, made headlines, and defined political campaigns. The 1965 Watts riots, the “red summer” of 1967, and other uprisings (many of them sparked by police violence in African American communities) added to the perception that crime and lawlessness were on the rise.Footnote 164
The report included a sprawling set of specific recommendations on law enforcement. The Katzenbach Committee began with the acknowledgment that relations between law enforcement and the inhabitants of what they referred to as “slum” neighborhoods were frayed and “prejudiced.”Footnote 165 Thus, a first set of recommendations focused on the need to create better “police–community” relations. The committee recommended that police departments should create community-relations programs “in any community that has a substantial minority population.”Footnote 166 A second set of recommendations tackled what the committee saw as rampant individual discretion within police departments. Too much discretion or the failure to follow established guidelines could worsen already poor police–community relations. Thus several of the committee's recommendations focused on professionalizing and training police officers to follow uniform guidelines. The commission argued that police departments “should develop and enunciate policies that give police personnel specific guidance for the common situations requiring exercising of police discretion.”Footnote 167 Following specific guidelines would reduce the individual officer's discretionary power and prescribe as far as possible what actions the officer should take in a given situation. Further recommendations focused on hiring practices and the need for increased pay and more research to “continually test, challenge, and evaluate professional techniques and procedures in order to keep abreast of social and technical change.”Footnote 168 In short, the commission advocated for professionalizing law enforcement as a way to reduce crime and racial disorder in American cities.
This was a philosophy that the Governor's Committee shared and even borrowed from directly. In 1967, the North Carolina legislature made the this committee a formal state agency.Footnote 169 As outlined in the Senate bill, the duties of the committee were articulated broadly: It coordinated the activities of separate law enforcement agencies, made “studies and recommendations for the improvement of law enforcement and criminal justice,” encouraged “public support and respect for law and order,” and, most expansively of all, sought “ways to make North Carolina safe and secure.”Footnote 170 The committee was tasked with researching the causes of crime in North Carolina and issuing policy recommendations based on this research. The committee was composed almost exclusively of law enforcement and corrections professionals, including the director of the SBI, the commander of the State Highway Patrol, the commissioner of the Department of Correction, the director of the Probation Commission, the chairperson of the Board of Paroles, the adjutant general of the state National Guard, the commissioner of the Board of Juvenile Corrections, and the director of the newly created Administrative Office of the Courts. Rounding out the committee was the chairperson of the Good Neighbor Council and a handful of local sheriffs, city police chiefs, and a consultant from the Institute of Government.
The first report of the Governor's Committee, titled Assessment of Crime and Criminal Justice System in North Carolina, published in June 1969, bore the all the marks of the Katzenbach Committee's 1967 report. The committee quoted liberally from the Katzenbach Report, and even the opening chapter's title, “The Challenge of Crime in North Carolina,” was a nod to the Katzenbach Report's title. More substantially, the report of the Governor's Committee matched the Katzenbach Report in philosophy and in the substance of its recommendations on local law enforcement. While much of the 130-page report was dedicated to outlining trends in crime in North Carolina in the 1960s and the overall organization of the state's criminal justice system, it also delivered a set of guiding arguments on what it identified as the “causes” of crime in the state. Significantly, the report steered clear of any race-based arguments typically proffered by southern conservatives. Instead, in the tradition of liberal law-and-order politics, it argued that the problem of crime was often the result of poverty and racial discrimination. As the Governor's Committee put it: “In a sense, social and economic conditions also ‘cause’ crime. Crime flourishes in city slums where overcrowding, poverty, social disruption, and racial discrimination are native.”Footnote 171 More specifically, the committee worried that North Carolina's criminal justice system itself exacerbated the problem:
Another “cause” of crime can said to be the failure of the criminal justice system to operate as effectively as it might. Otherwise preventable crimes will occur if the agencies of law enforcement and justice and social service do not perform effectively. If the administration of justice is not dispensed with reasonable certainty, promptness, and fairness, deterrence of crime will be blunted.… Thus, it can be argued that changes could be made in the way that the formal criminal justice process works that would result in the occurrence of less crime.Footnote 172
This argument mirrored one of the central arguments of the Katzenbach Committee—that once modernized and rendered race neutral, the machinery of the criminal justice system itself could actively reduce crime and unrest.
Law enforcement was of particular concern for the Governor's Committee: “Before the criminal-justice process begins, something happens that is infrequently discussed in textbooks and seldom recognized by the public: law enforcement policy is made by the policeman and sheriff.”Footnote 173 Noting that the criminal code “is not a set of specific instructions to policemen,” the committee argued that individual officers had a large amount of “personal discretion.”Footnote 174 According to the committee, the personal discretion of the local law enforcement officer meant that North Carolina's criminal justice system “does not always work the way citizens think it does or wish it would.” In fact, the committee concluded, “That [the criminal justice system] manages to function at all is surprising, considering the number of problems and people with which it is burdened and the resources available for treating them.”Footnote 175
If the Governor's Committee report ended on a dim view about the poor state of North Carolina's criminal justice system, its attendant and equally lengthy reports, Guide to Local Law Enforcement Planning (published May 1969) and Police Information Network (published June 1969) were far more optimistic about North Carolina's ability to modernize one aspect of the justice system: law enforcement. In these documents, the committee laid out professionalization strategies, focusing on four areas: law enforcement training programs, programs for police–community relations, data collection on officer performance, and a police information network.Footnote 176 Similar to the SBI identification program, the Police Information Network (PIN) sought to improve “statewide communications among law enforcement agencies and to provide for a timely and complete information flow among these agencies.”Footnote 177 At the heart of PIN was what the committee described as a “large scale electronic computer” and “telecommunications terminal” to store information on criminal offenders and persons under investigation that would then be accessible to all state and local law enforcement units in North Carolina. The North Carolina state legislature passed legislation to create PIN in July 1969 in a bill that also created the Division of Criminal Statistics, which was designated with managing the information collected by the new program.Footnote 178 Together, these three 1969 Governor's Committee reports encouraged the professionalization of law enforcement in North Carolina. As inheritors of liberal law and order at both the state and national levels, these reports offered far-reaching recommendations on how to improve police–community relations, advance officer training to encourage police to follow set procedures rather than “personal discretion,” and equip police departments with modern technology to heighten the surveillance of citizens. But in professionalizing law enforcement in North Carolina, law enforcement's reach also expanded significantly, culminating a succession of far-reaching legislation in the late 1960s.
Indeed, by the close of the 1960s, the Governor's Committee also functioned as North Carolina's primary policymaking body on legislation relating to crime, racial disorder, and riot control. This comported with the committee's broader orientation toward liberal law-and-order policing. At its creation, Governor Moore emphasized the committee's purpose as an entity designed to secure the neutral application of law and order and eradicate racial violence. Moore's reference point was the UKA, which the governor accused of “dastardly” crimes. However, the committee in practice dedicated resources to developing legislation and law enforcement powers to contain the tactics of civil rights activists. This was especially true in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. King's death provoked mass protest, peaceful marches, and uprising across the United States, including in North Carolina. Fearing that the state lacked “an adequate legal framework for dealing with riots and other disturbances,” Moore asked the committee to recommend legislation to “deal with massive or widespread civil disorders.”Footnote 179 The resulting 234-page report, Proposed Legislation Relating to Riots and Civil Disorders, offered little analysis of what motivated the 1968 protests, but nevertheless recommended a weighty piece of legislation that created and defined criminal offenses relating to participation in a riot, created new rules of search and seizure during riots, and set out new powers of the governor, city municipalities, and counties to respond to states of emergency. The committee then offered: “The arbitrary choice was made to place that article in Chapter 14, which is the chapter on criminal law.”Footnote 180 That decision, however, was anything but arbitrary. The proposed legislation seamlessly reframed the mass protest of King's assassination into anti-riot legislation. The committee's proposed legislation quickly came before the General Assembly, and Moore signed H.B. 321 into law in June 1969, a mere three months after the committee submitted its proposed legislation. As discussed previously, H.B. 321 conflated acts of civil disobedience and protest with rioting and served as legal grounds for the surveillance of civil rights organizations.
In sum, what began as incremental legislation designed to augment the powers of state law enforcement officers to police Klan violence and the civil rights movement were transformed in the late 1960s into an influential and well-funded research and policymaking agency. Indeed, Governor Moore saw the expansion of professionalized local police departments as a primary tool in what he called the “maintenance of law and order.” Although the governor's office could call upon the SBI, the State Highway Patrol, and the National Guard, Moore explained, “we must not forget that the maintenance of law and order and the apprehension of criminal law violators are still the primary responsibility of local law enforcement officers. This is our heritage and we want to continue and strengthen it.”Footnote 181 The development of law enforcement policy in the 1950s and 1960s was rooted in liberal law-and-order politics. More specifically, it was rooted in the belief that establishing and maintaining professionalized, well-trained, and robust police forces would deter racially motivated violence, curb riots and urban uprisings, and reduce crime.
In this regard, the expansion and professionalization of state and local law enforcement in the 1950s and 1960s proved essential for the governance of Sunbelt capitalism. UKA membership in North Carolina remained high in the late 1960s, and black civil rights protest continued in the state, sometimes growing into mass uprising. This fueled moderates’ fears that visible racial violence and activism would inhibit the state's ability to continue to garner extra-regional contracts. Like his predecessors, Moore spearheaded several “industry-hunting expeditions” designed to position North Carolina as a premier Sunbelt state. These included the Trade Mission and Textile Show and Exportunity 1966, a major effort conducted with the support of the U.S. Department of Commerce to support the development of North Carolina's export markets. Moore was very successful in securing Sunbelt development. The Moore administration authorized more than 450 foreign corporations to do business in North Carolina in 1966 alone, and as he announced on statewide television, the state's industrial development “reached new heights. The total investment was $613,581,000, up more than 27 percent over 1965, for 589 new plants and plant expansions. These projects will add 37,455 jobs and $141.8 million to our state's industrial payrolls.”Footnote 182 These numbers underscore the rapidity with which Sunbelt capitalism emerged as the primary economic model in the state during the postwar years. They also make clear the continued importance, for southern moderates, of protecting Sunbelt capitalist growth into the late 1960s. The creation of expanded and professionalized state and local law enforcement between the mid-1950s and 1970 was not the product of the overt racial repression of southern demagogues or Nixonian conservatives, but rather of the moderates employing liberal law and order to govern the Sunbelt economy.
CONCLUSION
This article has documented the emergence of liberal law-and-order politics and carceral policy in the Sunbelt state of North Carolina. Carceral policy in the midcentury South was neither the product of a “crime problem” nor, as previous scholarship has argued, of southern conservatives unilaterally seeking to institute a “new Jim Crow” through racially repressive crime policy. While the corrosive racism of conservative demagogues is undoubtedly important, I offer a different explanation.
Ultimately, I have shown that North Carolina moderates—policymakers with material links to Sunbelt capitalism, political links to national liberal elites, and an ideological commitment to the principles of racial liberalism—were pioneers of state-level carceral development. Indeed, moderate politicians routinely disavowed and displaced conservative law-and-order arguments. African Americans, they argued, were not predisposed to crime. Rather, lax and prejudicial enforcement of laws garnered inevitable and problematic results: It gave whites permission to enforce segregation with violence and African Americans permission to take to the streets. This state of affairs, moderates argued, required not outright racial repression, but a new set of robust yet race-neutral criminal justice policies. The aspects of carceral policy covered in this article—expanding state criminal codes, anti-juvenile-delinquency measures, and law enforcement policy—were the fruits of these strategies. In popularizing liberal law-and-order politics and aligning their policies with those of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, North Carolina moderates also tilted the state toward carceral expansion.
This argument revises scholarly understanding of what contributed to U.S. carceral development in two additional ways. First, it updates our understanding of how and when forces of race and capitalism fused to drive the implementation of crime policy. Several groundbreaking studies have analyzed the relationship between race, neoliberalism, and incarceration, but in this article I have directed our attention to an earlier and more regionally specific era of American capitalism: Sunbelt capitalism in the postwar South. Making North Carolina a stable environment for the arrival of the Sunbelt economy was a priority for southern moderates. It was a priority, moreover, that indelibly shaped these policymakers’ approach to race in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and the broader civil rights movement, prompting them to embrace liberal law-and-order politics and pass new crime legislation, often in coordination with national crime policy. This suggests that the Sunbelt South's expanding carceral structures initially emerged in lockstep with the “high tide” of midcentury liberalism,Footnote 183 thus preceding the subsequent ascent of neoliberal governance in the 1970s. Put differently, the timeline offered in this article suggests that neoliberalism did not inaugurate, but has seriously intensified, perhaps the most expansive augmentation of state authority in modern American politics: the development of the U.S. carceral state.
Finally, this article rethinks the relationship between the civil rights movement and carceral policy in the South. Other scholars have documented the movement in North Carolina with far more skill and detail than I have here.Footnote 184 What I offer instead is an analysis of the processes by which liberal law-and-order politics and its attendant carceral expansions sought to quietly quell black civil rights activism even as they targeted some of white supremacy's most notorious forms of violence. In the Sunbelt South, the containment of black rights occurred not primarily by way of state-sanctioned violence or unchecked white mobs (although these did occur), but by way of an expanding state criminal code designed to prevent “extremism”; juvenile delinquency policy that located the “seeds of crime” in poor, mostly black neighborhoods; and expansions to law enforcement that diagnosed black activists as manufacturers of disorder and lawlessness. The forces of liberal law and order were no less successful in policing the civil rights movement than conservative reactionaries and demagogues. In fact, in the end, liberal law-and-order politics and policy proved somewhat more successful than its conservative counterpart—both in defending the Sunbelt's capital interests and curtailing the realization of black civil rights—precisely because it adhered to emerging norms of colorblindness, racial neutrality, and uniform administration of the criminal justice system.
