Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship

An elegant and thought-provoking history of the Insurrection Act and its enduring entanglement with American race relations.

We can’t talk about the Insurrection Act in America without talking about race. The Act was passed in 1807 to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces domestically to fend off rebellion against slavery―amid the silent fear that enslaved people would violently revolt en masse against their bondage. Later, in a curious paradox, the Act was used to enforce the civil rights of African Americans, defending the entry of Black students into previously segregated educational institutions, but also to quell riots that erupted after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Over history, its overall application has swung between protection of white property and protection of Black people, depending on political context. More recently, the Insurrection Act was invoked to suppress the so-called “race riots” in Los Angeles in 1992. President Trump has often threatened to use its power to deploy federal troops to American cities, both in response to the nationwide protests following George Floyd’s killing in 2020 and during his second presidency.

Since its conception two centuries ago, the Act has never been free of entanglement with race. Lawyer and critic Hawa Allan’s distinctly literary voice delivers paradigm-shifting reflections on not only the Act itself, but also recurring patterns in American history, which cycles between calls for Black equity and the responding reaction of white resentment―between racial “progress” and retrenchment. Throughout, she also draws revealing insight from her own experiences as one of the only Black girls in her leafy Long Island suburb, as a Black lawyer at a predominantly white firm during a visit from presidential candidate Barack Obama, and as a thinker about the use and misuse of appeals to law and order. Luminous and profound, deeply researched and intensely felt, Insurrection is necessary reading in our reckoning with structural racism, government power, and protest in the United States.

Hawa Allan is an attorney and author whose work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the Baffler, among other publications. She lives and works in New York City.