INSURRECTION

How presidential invocations of the Insurrection Act of 1807 have reflected the contested status of African American civil rights.

As cultural critic and attorney Allan explains, the act authorizes the deployment of military and federal forces against its own citizens but leaves it up to the executive to determine what counts as an insurrection. This openness means that invocations of the act become touchstones for the fears and priorities not just of particular presidents, but of the culture’s various competing factions during specific historical moments. A pattern of alternating, antithetical motivations, Allan makes clear, can be discerned in a long-term view of the roughly two dozen instances in which the act has been invoked: either a desire to restrict African American civil rights by stifling protests against slavery or other racial injustices or to enforce those rights against the indifference or resistance of local authorities. What we ultimately witness in studying the act, she provocatively but convincingly argues, is an “ongoing and often bloody battle to fully incorporate Black Americans into the citizenry of the United States—a struggle which…appears more like an open-ended civil war than a history of ‘progress.’ ” Though Allan sometimes strains to provide broad philosophical commentary on the existential topics she discusses and in framing historical events with personal responses to contemporary flashpoints, her explication of the act’s use and sociohistorical significance is consistently incisive and illuminating. Particularly effective are the author’s explorations of John F. Kennedy’s two invocations of the act in his attempts to desegregate schools as well as the striking genealogy set forth in tracing legal and social expressions of White supremacy from the antebellum era to the Trump era. Though he “did not invoke the Act,” writes Allan, “his administration did devise a means of federal intervention in the protests against police brutality in Portland, Oregon.”

An insightful, cogent consideration of the history and persistence of conflicts over racial equality in America.