In Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae makes a strong argument for white women’s vital role in protecting and perpetuating white supremacy and thwarting integration in the US. One hundred years ago, woman began to organize in ways that we would recognize from today’s resistance movements. They developed grassroots campaigns reaching out to other women and encouraging them to organize, to write letters, to publish, to speak up and to vote. They did this, however, in the name of Jim Crow, as a way to shore up white power in the face of legislation that would dismantle it. McRae demonstrates how white women, not just in the South but across the nation, turned their traditional roles as mothers, defenders of family and children, tellers of stories, and activists in schools into a political force that sustained racism, reshaped American conservatism, and continues to influence our politics and culture.
McRae’s goal is to demonstrate that the “fiercest proponents” of massive resistance to desegregation and racial integration in 20th century America were “…the daily grassroots activists who continually reshaped their support for various versions of racial segregation.” These diehard activists were largely white women who used their special roles in social welfare, public education, electoral politics and popular culture to keep the spirit of Jim Crow alive even when its legal basis had been removed by the Supreme Court and the federal government. She divides the book into two parts and a conclusion. Part I is entitled “Massive Support for Racial Segregation, 1920-1941”, Part II is “Massive Resistance to the Black Freedom Struggle, 1942-1974,” and the conclusion is “The New National Face of Segregation: Boston Women Against Busing.”
In Part I, McRae explains the ways in which women acted as foot soldiers in the service of white supremacy in the decades before Brown v. Board of Education and the modern civil rights movement. While male dominated political bodies could pass race-based laws and make policies, they would be meaningless without enforcement on the community level. An example of this was Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited the “mixing” of races through marriage. This type of law was common in the US, and frequently, white women were the people who held positions and possessed the local knowledge to enforce the law. To illustrate how this would work, McRae details the work of Margaret Goodman, a white teacher and registrar, who used her power as registrar to report individuals to the state whom she believed were trying to pass for white and engage in interracial marriage. Goodman wasn’t alone in using her power as a registrar in this way. Then there were the young women of Sweet Briar College who were recruited to assist in a eugenics study, observing and writing about the harmful effects of interracial mixing in the community. McRae provides plenty of detail to demonstrate the key role white women played in acting as racial enforcers in their communities.
With access to local knowledge and to institutions central to the sorting out of race, women designated racial lines, labeled families, and drew boundaries around black and white in their communities. In doing so, white women made decisions that would affect families for the rest of the century.
Throughout counties and towns in the South, white women used their local knowledge and “intuition” as well as political clout to maintain racial order. Some women became politically active on behalf of the Democratic Party and later the Dixiecrats and Republicans. Much like today’s grassroots volunteers, they wrote letters to politicians and newspapers, organized rallies and marches, and fearlessly criticized both the federal government and members of their own party who seemed more interested in protecting their careers than serving the community at large. McRae does a great job showing how these women were able to eventually help turn the tide against what they viewed as a traitorous Democratic Party in the South and shape the rising conservative movement.
Perhaps most importantly, though, white women were able to exercise formidable influence over education, an area that has traditionally been female dominated. As McRae points out elsewhere in the book, the school is where family, children and motherhood meet federal laws and policy. As members of school boards and PTAs, as concerned mothers, white women in the south spoke up forcefully to make sure that teachers, administrators, school textbooks and the curriculum supported their views and that schools remained segregated. The grassroots work of white women here would not only help them make connections to conservative women across the county but would also be an example of how conservatives could fight liberalism in other areas.
In part II, McRae looks at the impact of World War, Cold War, the changing legal landscape, and the civil rights movement on segregation. White women had bolstered their views on segregation in the past by claiming that Southerners know better than outsiders how to deal with blacks. In their newspaper columns and letters, they emphasized that they “knew black people” and could point to blacks who supported their views. They asserted that blacks wanted segregation as much as white people. At the same time, white women had worked to make sure that textbooks erased black voices and black history. The prevailing view was that white people simply knew better, were smarter than blacks, and that letting outsiders impose equality would lead to trouble. World War II and the labor movement, however, opened up new opportunities for black Americans. FDR and especially First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt were reviled in the South for their efforts regarding equal treatment of blacks. The rising labor movement, unionization, the desegregation of the armed services, and the red scare sounded all kinds of alarm bells across the United States, but in the South, the civil rights movement added a greater level of fear. The southern way of life was under threat, and both federal laws and policies (re: voting, employment, etc), and Supreme Court decisions meant that Jim Crow was legally ending. The civil rights movement provided ample evidence that blacks were not on board with segregation and that they were just as capable of grassroots organization as white women had been. It’s during this period that segregationist white women altered their approach to preserving segregation. Given their previous experience with grassroots organizing, they had had opportunities to work with conservative women’s groups in the north and out west. Without giving up their goal of maintaining segregation, they focused more and more on anti-communism and preserving constitutional rights. For these women across the nation, labor, the civil rights movement and communism were all linked. The United States was in danger of falling victim to “global government” via the United Nations, and so women, yet again, had to take up their positions at that line of battle where family meets government: the schools.
In the conclusion, McRae examines the final frontier of the segregation battle, the place where she contends that the battle for segregation went from being a Southern fight to a national fight: Boston in the 1970s. When the federal government and courts struck down segregation laws and required integration of schools, many Americans looked at the south without considering the segregation in their own back yard. In the south, segregation what been de jure, that is by law until federal law stopped it. Yet segregation in north and south was also de facto. Neighborhoods in many northern cities had “black” sections and “white” sections. Federal desegregation laws meant that schools in those places had to desegregate as well. How was this to be done? Courts decided it meant busing kids to schools outside their district. McRae examines the anti-busing fight in Boston, and yet again, white women rally just as their counterparts in the south had done in the 1950s and 1960s. White women in the north use not only the same tactics but the same arguments that southern white women had used in their fight against desegregation. White women of the north would argue that they were not opposed to integration of schools, they were just anti-busing, and yet the protests that rocked Boston had overtly racist overtones. I found this section of the book very timely to read, as so many whites in the US today claim they aren’t racist but participate in upholding systemic racism nonetheless.
McRae’s work here is outstanding. She makes a forceful argument and backs it up with plenty of excellent primary resources, frequently featuring the words of four southern women who were nationally recognized leaders in their promotion of segregation and preservation of the southern way of life. This is a powerful and impressive study, and I found myself stunned by the widespread and well organized resistance that women organized on behalf of such a heinous cause. Yet it also made me stop and think about the privilege that my family and I still benefit from. I think many of us have participated in protests and marches over the past year; we’ve made phone calls and gone door to door, and we feel good about ourselves. But when we are confronted with the lack of intersectionality in our movements, we take offense. We aren’t racist! We can’t be racist, can we? I still feel committed to fighting the injustices I see in the US, and this book shows that white women can make significant change by organizing. But we still haven’t solved the crimes of segregation and racial inequality. If we aren’t admitting that, if we aren’t listening to and acting on the voices that can inform us about it, we are complicit.