“Agency of Change: How Agency (In)actions Shape our Laws and Society” which provides an analysis of not only agency responses to claims of discrimination, but also what roles interest groups played in helping individuals and groups targeted by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By exploring early employment discrimination claims submitted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under Title VII, I compare multiple policy targets (those discriminated against on the basis of race, color, and sex), allowing me to gain insight into how the same law is applied to different groups. I am also analyzing comparatively the roles of interest groups such as the NAACP and National Organization for Women (NOW) in helping individuals claim and advance their rights.

Taking a primarily interpretive approach in this manuscript enables me to examine the complex interactions between individuals’ claims of Title VII rights, interest groups aiding these individuals, and the EEOC interpretations of the law. Beginning by coding approximately 1,600 archival documents I collected from the first three years of the EEOC – letters of correspondence between individual claimants, the NAACP, NOW, and EEOC – I selected a sample of 100 letters to analyze in-depth using discourse analysis. These letters are supplemented by over 50,000 other archival documents collected from the National Archives, NAACP Special Collections at the Library of Congress and NOW Archives at Schlesinger Library, EEOC rules and regulations from the time period, as well as interview transcripts, media accounts, and court cases.

Theoretically, my book builds on George Lovell’s This is Not Civil Rights (2012) and Michael McCann’s Rights at Work (1994) in proposing a new theoretical foundation for how society is shaped through legal interactions outside of the courts. I expect students and future scholars will look to this book as an example of how unorganized individuals, interest groups, and government agencies are all potential change makers through their visions of law. To structure this argument, I focus on two pathways to social change that I uncovered in the course of my study: 1) the strategic pathway undertaken by the NAACP and 2) the formation pathway exemplified by NOW.

The first pathway demonstrates how an interest group can strategically target an agency to pursue its social change agenda. This strategic pathway is explored through the lens of the interactions among the NAACP, claimants, and the EEOC. By organizing the collection and submission of thousands of claims to the EEOC, the NAACP not only aided claimants, but also helped the EEOC use these claims as an opportunity to establish affirmative action programs with employers - even when the employer was not in violation of Title VII. As such, I highlight how the NAACP facilitated the filing of claims as part of a strategy for changing law and society through individual agency rulings, regulations, and institutional policies. Social change was a deliberate objective of the NAACP in this example, and I demonstrate how it manifested itself in everything from assistance in filling out claim forms and staffing the agency to the agency’s conciliation efforts and communications with elected officials.

The second pathway shows how interest groups can form in response to an agency’s denial of rights claims. I discuss the formation pathway via my study of how NOW was established following the submission of individual claims made by women without the support of an interest group to guide them through the claims making process. Women were submitting claims of employment discrimination at a rate the agency did not expect. A third of the claims filed with the EEOC in its first year, and nearly every year since, were on the basis of sex discrimination. A confused and reluctant EEOC delayed decisions on these claims, and other EEOC rulings denied Title VII rights under the law’s sex provision. Advocates for women inside the EEOC and other parts of government were unable to reverse this path, so they looked to the NAACP as inspiration. Establishing itself as an “NAACP for Women” NOW formed to provide support for the interpretations made by women in their claims to the EEOC. By mirroring the strategies of the NAACP, even as a new organization, it was able to push for the agency to act on claims of sex discrimination and get the agency to reverse earlier decisions that denied Title VII rights.

Speaking to public law and public policy literatures, this manuscript relates to both audiences by demonstrating the similarities in arguments regarding the power of regulations and other legal interpretations made by claimants, interest groups, and agencies. By distilling the relevant concepts from these sub-disciplines and supporting my argument with literature from other disciplines (sociology, history, and public administration), my contribution to the literature in all these fields is guided by a need to understand the deeper phenomena of legal interpretation and mobilization that occurred and transcends disciplinary boundaries. In utilizing these literatures, I place much of the terminology into language suited for general audiences to ensure its accessibility to my secondary audience of bureaucrats and interest group practitioners as well as to a more general audience of readers interested in social change.