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.