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Drawing extensively on public and private presidential papers, private correspondence, personal interviews, and national archive documents, this is an account of the racial philosophy, policies and practices of successive US Presidents from Warren G. Harding to Bill Clinton. The author points out that no President has ever signed into law a federal anti-lynching bill, despite a 50-year campaign by the NAACP for presidential and congressional action. He sets out to show how Nixon, Reagan and Bush rolled back civil rights and affirmative action, failed to enforce, in full, equal-protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment against police abuse and racial violence, encouraged conservative legal obstructionism, and fuelled the rise of a repressive domestic security state. Hutchinson argues that these actions have in turn reinforced institutionalized racism and continued the historic pattern of devaluing black lives in law and public policy.