We find this inversion in much of the rhetoric of “states’ rights,” a phrase used to defend the liberty of U.S. states in the South from federal intervention. But the federal intervention that is most associated with the call for “states’ rights” is the elimination of slavery, and subsequently Jim Crow laws restricting the right to vote for black citizens. The liberty that many whites in Southern states sought by calling for “states’ rights” was the freedom to restrict the liberties of their fellow black citizens.
