Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy Illustrated Edition

by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0190271718

ISBN-10: 019027171X

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Why do white supremacist politics in America remain so powerful? Elizabeth Gillespie McRae argues that the answer lies with white women.

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that
upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national
networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Without these mundane, everyday acts, white supremacist politics could not have shaped local, regional, and national politics the way it did or lasted as long as it has.

With white women at the center of the story, the rise of postwar conservatism looks very different than the male-dominated narratives of the resistance to Civil Rights. Women like Nell Battle Lewis, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker publicized threats to their Jim
Crow world through political organizing, private correspondence, and journalism. Their efforts began before World War II and the Brown decision and persisted past the 1964 Civil Rights Act and anti-busing protests. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with
and shaping the rise of the New Right. Mothers of Massive Resistance reveals the diverse ways white women sustained white supremacist politics and thought well beyond the federal legislation that overturned legal segregation.

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From the Publisher


'The Investigators.' Sweet Briar students in Ivan McDougle’s sociology class who conducted the fieldwork in the Amherst county community of Bear Mountain and contributed their research to Mongrel Virginians. Arthur Estabrook Papers, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, Albany, State University of New York.	A young Nell Battle Lewis serving with the American Expeditionary Forces in France before she returned to Raleigh to begin work at the News and Observer. Kemp Plummer Lewis Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.	Concerned Parents Association Meeting, Charlotte, North Carolina. Over 600 white middle-class parents meet to organize a boycott of metropolitan-wide busing. Courtesy of the Charlotte Observer and the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.


September 2, 1970, protest at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public School headquarters. White students adopted the 'freedom of choice' language that segregationists had invoked since the Brown decision. While black youth in the NAACP watched as white students pledged support for integration but not for the busing that would accomplish it. Courtesy of the Charlotte Observer and the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.	Faced with busing between white and black neighborhoods in Boston, white students and mothers lined the streets. Like suburban white students in Charlotte, these Bostonians claimed they were not against integration, just busing. They rejected identification with white southerners, arguing that their protests were not about racial segregation but about constitutional rights. Courtesy of Spencer Grant and Spencer Grant Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

Review

"Readers will find this to be a deeply researched and chronologically impressive account of white conservative women in the twentieth century. While McRae claims a specific focus on four white southern women who were activists in conservative organising, the chapters often extend into broader
sketches of rapidly shifting global and national landscapes. The New Deal, world war, the threat of communism, decolonisation, and the civil rights movement provided these women with new approaches to championing the cause of white supremacy. McRae's work highlights the resilience of that position."
-- Stephanie R. Rolph, English Historical Review

"Mothers of Massive Resistance effectively ties segregationists to the development of conservatism nationally and shows that massive resistance was not a sudden and short-lived response to the Brown decision." -- Lisa Lindquist Dorr , Journal of Southern History

"Brilliantly argued...Rather than hewing to southern exceptionalism, McRae explains how segregationist activists connected themselves to national debates...Mothers of Massive Resistance, like other recent books on right-wing women, is part of an important feminist historical project that goes beyond
celebrating foremothers to understanding how and why women have helped build oppressive institutions." -- Rebecca Hill, Journal of American History

"Though this is a thoroughly-researched historical study, McRae does not present strictly chronological order, but lets the lives of the women shine forth and parallel the historical events -- local and national, domestic and private -- that they shaped ... McRae is unafraid to plainly state where
segregationist and conservative interests and rhetoric overlap and to pinpoint where even academics fail to showcase them." -- LaToya Jefferson-James, Arkansas Review

"This is an ambitious and well-written book, and McRae makes compelling case that white southern segregationists had more power to fortify and shape white supremacy and the rise of massive resistance than historians to date have recognized. Readers will find that one of the most striking features of
this book is the haunting familiarity of these white supremacist tropes in our current political discourse, evidence that this history is vitally important to the ongoing struggle for racial justice." -- Zoë Burkholder, History of Education Quarterly

"A valuable addition to the politically urgent study of whiteness in American History."--Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Library Journal, starred review

"The crystal-clear message of this thoroughly researched and impressively documented book is that white supremacy remains a powerful force in the United States."--Kirkus Reviews

"A strikingly original and unsettling analysis of the 'long segregation movement.' Tracking this struggle to maintain racial difference and distance from the eugenics mania of the 1920s through the watershed of the 1940s to the Boston busing crisis and the rise of the New Right, Elizabeth McRae
paints a vivid portrait of hard-working white women in local communities across the country who, drawing on their moral authority as mothers, fought to protect white privilege, sometimes explicitly, through the tactics of massive resistance, sometimes covertly, under the guise of school choice and
limited government. A must read for understanding the politics of white supremacy over the past half century and in our own time."--Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Women have long been marginalized in studies of segregation, but Mothers of Massive Resistance makes a powerful case for placing them at the center of our attention. In this smartly argued book, Elizabeth McRae shows that southern white women not only brought massive resistance into being, but then
sustained its growth at the grassroots in vitally important ways."--Kevin Kruse, Princeton University

"A product of extraordinary research, McRae's gracefully written account captures the critical role white women of the South played in defending segregation even as it exposes the deep-seated cultural assumptions that led them to battle."--Dan Carter, University of South Carolina

"Brilliantly demonstrates how white women were both the everyday architects of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South and fully connected to national movements to enforce racial segregation and promote political conservatism. It excavates the grassroots activism of female segregationists in their
roles as suffragists, social workers, eugenicists, school teachers, textbook censors, journalists, storytellers, garden clubbers, party activists, anticommunists, and most of all as wives and mothers."--Matthew Lassiter, author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

"This deeply researched history of women and the work of segregation represents a major revision of Jim Crow and gender history. We see just how widespread and unrelenting, coordinated and feminine anti-integration efforts became over the early and mid-twentieth century--within and beyond the
south. Indeed, women were the 'mass in massive resistance.'"--Michelle Nickerson, author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right

"A fascinating, meticulously researched, and damning look into the myriad ways white women have consciously worked to aid racial segregation in the Jim Crow South and sanctify their racially pure vision of white motherhood...McRae's book shines a harsh light on our status as collaborators and
progenitors in the mainstream white-supremacist movement, and is essential reading for any white woman who seeks to understand our history-and our responsibility to those we've failed."--Kim Kelly, Bitch Magazine

"A sharp look at mainstream, everyday segregationism: the segregationism of respectable white women...McRae's book is an excellent history of white women's politics generally, but it's especially strong as a history of white women acting to protect 'their' public schools...McRae's project fulfills
nearly all the requirements for a feminist history. She uncovers the role women played in a well-known historical movement, in which powerful or violent men-Klan members or George Wallace-are usually assigned the lead. She shines a light on their under-recognized, feminized work to shape and support
that movement. She even demonstrates how women responded to gendered and class-based limitations on their power to perpetuate segregation in the public sphere with creativity and resilience."--Rebecca Stoner, Pacific Standard

"An essential addition...McRae's book is likely to endure as a work that helps to permanently transform our understanding of the relationship between the Jim Crow South and what she calls Jim Crow Nation, and the emergence of the New Right. McRae rightly calls the political mobilization of
segregationist women in the South and elsewhere a women's movement. These conservative women, previously unheralded in the historical literature, staked their claim as political actors, calling on their traditional-and powerful-role as mothers to express their views and exert influence on a host of
political and cultural issues, while never completely disguising the fidelity to white supremacy that animated and joined together their various causes."--Zachary J. Lechner, H-South, H-Net Reviews

"McRae...makes the compelling case that reducing massive resistance to a decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s obscures its political evolution and renders its activists reactionaries...Examining this resistance through the eyes of four southern white segregationists...McRae reveals that these
women and their southern sisters were...part of a widespread political mobilization. Though initially these women publicly promoted the importance of maintaining de jure segregation and 'white over black,' over time they came to emphasize other fears...but ideas of white supremacy always remained
under the surface. For McRae, the forced busing controversies of the 1970s...brings home the idea of an expanded notion of massive resistance and the idea that racism in the US has been persistent and pervasive, occurring across vast periods of time and crossing regional boundaries. McRae deserves
kudos for her extensive research."--Choice

About the Author

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae is an associate professor of history and director of graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition (February 1, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 019027171X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0190271718
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.48 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.3 x 1.2 x 6.4 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #885,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,294 in United States History (Books)
- #4,921 in Discrimination & Racism (Books)
- #5,113 in Women in History

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visionaryprism2

Brave and groundbreaking author

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2018

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A very rare book on a subject that society is too cowardly to peer into, namely the role white women have played in bigotry historically. The author used their quotes to illustrate her point very well and my only minor issue is that I wish the book would have gone back even further in history. This is one of only 3 or 4 books of its type(that I've been able to find) that really focuses on white women's contributions to xenophobic racism so it's a must-have. Our society is well-accustomed to naming the white men responsible for bigotry historically but rarely ever mentions any of the white women in history who played their part. Why is that?

15 people found this helpful

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Tonstant Weader

I read this to answer one question. It answered it and so much more.

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2018

Mothers of Massive Resistance is an academic examination of the role of activist women have played in fighting for segregation both in law (de jure) and in practice (de facto.) Elizabeth Gillespie McRae examines not only how segregationist laws and Jim Crow relied on women’s participation in enforcement, but how women organized and led the massive resistance to desegregation and the maintenance of white supremacy.

Because so much of Jim Crow fell into the milieu of women, women were integral to carrying out Jim Crow. For example, Virginia’s Racial Integrity Law asked teachers, nurses, midwives, and county clerks to identify people’s race, to report people they suspected of passing, to make sure there were no black kids in white schools passing the color line. They were very willing and eager participants. However, that is just women carrying out the law. Women did much, much more.

White women led the partisan realignment in the South, turning from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Contrary to the conventional history, this began much earlier, during the New Deal, when women identified the New Deal as a threat to Jim Crow. For example, the Fair Employment Practices Commission set their hair afire, funding for public education seemed a potential threat as well. They saw these policies as levers to force integration. They began to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Democratic Party by calling themselves Jeffersonian Democrats, a precursor of Dixiecrats. We can see the Republican Party adopting a Southern Strategy far earlier than Nixon, purging the black-and-tan faction to accommodate the demands of the lily-white faction.Cornelia Dabney Tucker played a pivotal role, leaving the Democratic Party and demanding that the black-and-tan Tolbert faction lose their convention credentials to make way for her segregationists. White women led the partisan re-alignment, voting 18% more for Eisenhower than white men did.

We often think of massive resistance as George Wallace, Bull Drummond, and Orval Faubus, but while they talked, women worked and they started working decades earlier, on textbook committees to ensure white supremacy and the Southern revisionist history was taught. Working against the UN, UNICEF, and UNESCO in opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Genocide. Yes, they opposed the Convention on Genocide because they saw it could be used to address the treatment of black people in America. Over time, they cleverly dressed their segregationist white supremacy in a more neutral language of school choice, states’ rights, parental control, property values, and class. They were able to advocate white supremacist ends with language steeped in non-racialized themes. Their example was used by non-southern segregationists in other parts of the country, most famously in Boston against busing. Of course, the Bostonian anti-busing resistance would claim their opposition had nothing to do with race, but by the 70s, the white women resisting in the South had crafted conservative messages that portrayed itself as color-blind while seeking segregationist goals.

It’s possible my friends will celebrate me finishing this book as I won’t be calling them up or posting updates from reading. Yes, it is that good that I was probably annoying in my enthusiasm. What I found most fascinating, though, is a less explicitly named, but still clear pattern of current conservative principles rooted in the segregationist past. For example, if you complain about the Electoral College electing a president most Americans did not want, as sure as the sun will rise in the East, someone will say, “The United States is a republic, not a democracy.” It’s so irritating, because the United States is both a republic and a democracy and we do both imperfectly, but that chestnut is hauled out to defend injustice again and again. So where does it come from? In 1944, the Supreme Court told the Democratic Party of Texas it could not have a whites-only primary and in the opinion, the majority wrote the United States is a constitutional democracy. Well, there you have it, if we are a democracy, black people can vote, so the segregationists argued that we are a republic. And now, folks who have no idea it’s rooted in racism and Jim Crow parrot it as though it came down from George Washington himself in a stone tablet.

But there’s more, opposition to the United Nations, to public education, support for charter schools and vouchers. Over and over and over, segregationists defined principles that are still used today, deracialized because we don’t know the origins of those principles. It’s even worse than that, just as Alex Jones calls Sandy Hook and Parkland a false flag, so too did white women segregationists label the murder of Emmett Till. Unwilling to be accountable for the fruits of their racism, they denied he was murdered, denied the body that was found was his, just as today’s gundamentalists deny the dead bodies of America’s children.

I read this to understand how white women could vote for a serial predator whose open contempt for women should make him anathema to all women. I learned how very central white women are to maintaining white supremacy and forming the language and framework of massive resistance to the future we deserve. White women have been effective, flexible, strategic and persistent defenders of white supremacy and 2016 was no aberration.

I received an e-galley of Mothers of Massive Resistance from the publisher through Edelweiss.

67 people found this helpful

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Meme

White women will deny this book too! But, not all of them. Some are tired of ignoring the truth!

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2020

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If you are easily annoyed and always an anxiety-provoking, denialer, refused to dealt with truths...don't read this book.

If you can handle it and want to continue to believe lies, read Mildred Rutherford 100 pg book "The civilization of the old south". That book will make you feel warm & fuzzy.

For those who want to personally understand the ways in which white women gatekeepers created systemic racism at it finest. This is your book.

"Affectionate segregationist" This phrase resignated in the 1920's and now. Through newspaper articles, white woman social groups and political activism they are the architect for the erasure of black Americans over the last century.

The UDC & DAR distorted, mangled, creative lies, and erased an entire black populations from American historical narrative.

This book should be mandatory reading by all high schoolers in America.

4 people found this helpful

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pixlady

Everyone should read this book

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2019

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I was fortunate to have a history professor assign this book in my doctoral program. This book breaks it down. Incredible amount of research, easy to read and comprehend and important for people to know. As hard as it was to read because of the ugliness of white supremacy, it was necessary to read this book. Many people will be challenged with what they were taught, and to me, that's a great sign of exemplary research. I wish more people would face American history to learn from it and this book contributes to an important discussion. Well done!

6 people found this helpful

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Sean Green

OMG. I had no idea.

Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2018

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This book is both shocking and horrifying and you need to read it.

3 people found this helpful

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Danitza

Nuevo

Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2020