In Search of Federal Enforcement is a call to investigate the history of federal oversight to secure and preserve black Americans' voting rights over a ninety-five-year interregnum. This book satiates the reader's harboring curiosity as to why the national government was culpably negligent in protecting the exercise of the franchise for black Americans until the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As Holloway explains, much of this problem stemmed from Southern Democrats operating in tandem with the power of private actors to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment. This mutual-advantage partnership codified disfranchisement, safeguarded the interests of recalcitrant Southern states and localities, and defended local systems of privilege. In the pages of this timely study, Holloway lays bare the abject failure of the national government and critically evaluates how the Southern status quo stimulated chaos at the national level. Despite market paradigms, In Search of Federal Enforcement confronts this historical conundrum and offers keen observations about voting manipulations and electoral abuse by both incumbents and private actors.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the U.S. Congress engaged in bitter debates on whether to enact a federal law that would prosecute private citizens who lynched black Americans. In Getting Away with Murder, the fundamental question under scrutiny is whether Southern Democrats' racist attitudes toward black Americans pardoned the atrocities of lynching. The book investigates underlying motives of opposition to Senate filibustering and invites an intellectual discussion on why Southern Democrats thought states' rights were the remedy to lynching, when, in fact, the phenomenon was a baffling national crisis. A rebuttal to this query may include notions that congressional investigations into state-protected rights were deemed unconstitutional. In a unifying theme, the appeal ties into questions of the federalism-civil rights debate by noting intervals that warrant research and advancing new perspectives intended to accentuate the matrices of race-based politics. To examine the federalism-civil rights debate, this book asks three practical questions: (1) Would Southern Democrats suspend their friendships with private citizens and enact a federal law that would prosecute them for lynching? (2) Was the national government limited in its constitutional power to protect black Americans from private citizens who organized themselves as lynch mobs? (3) Were concerns for states' rights the core reasons for Senate filibustering, or did Southern Democrats' argument for states' rights support the lie of racism?