黑料传送门

"The Second, Selective Reconstruction" is a research article published in Studies in American Political Development, a U.S.-based academic journal for a political science subfield that emphasizes historical and institutional analyses of American politics. Because it is written by a foreign Americanist, its 'off-shore' production at the University of Tokyo would call for explanations, and some are offered here.
 
The enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which effectively enfranchised black southerners, was a major turning point in the course of twentieth century American politics. The events and the sacrifice that led to the law's passage have long shaped the country's shared narratives on who "We the People of the United States" are, and what equality, freedom and democracy mean to them. One can look no further than Director Ava DuVernay's 2014 film, Selma, to understand the law's significance.
 
My article examines an overlooked facet of that turning point, specifically the U.S. Department of Justice's enforcement of one of the law's critical provisions: the appointment of federal examiners to the southern jurisdictions. The examiners were sent there to place the black citizens on the local voter registration list. Proponents of the law expected that the provision would eradicate the inefficiencies and uneveness that had been pervasive in the federal litigation efforts during the previous years. Yet until now, exactly on what basis the Department's Civil Rights Division made the appointment decisions remained largely unknown. Previous accounts have commonly alleged that the Department gave up on strictly enforcing the law in some corners of the south, because it yielded to political pressures from President Lyndon Johnson, who in turn did not want to infuriate prominent southern Democrats in Congress who opposed the law. Presumably the president wished to continue counting on their vote for other purposes, such as enacting the Great Society programs, securing fund for the war in Vietnam, and his re-election bid in 1968.
 
However, my research, based on the archival materials of the Division, reveals another story. There is little textual evidence that the attorneys of the Civil Rights Division succumbed to pressures from the White House, politically favoring the President in the designation of southern counties for examiner appointment. Rather, it was the accumulation of the Division's knowledge gained from its investigation on voting rights violations and legal actions in court that later led to the Department's administrative decisions to send examiners. This meant that unless the violations had been filed to the court, the Department remained mostly unresponsive to the local complaints, even though the law's provision allowed black residents to bring them to the attention of the Attorney General.
 
The phase of finishing this article at U-Tokyo's Komaba campus has coincided with a tumultuous time in the United States: the federal government, including the Civil Rights Division and the Justice Department, is getting eviscerated and repurposed. Theories abound. Writing the article in such an environment, I prioritized empiricism as much as I could. Whatever insight a reader takes out of the article, I hope that it helps scholarly understandings of democratization, law enforcement, and exercises of political citizenship in America.
 

(Written by HIRAMATSU Ayako, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2026)