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

by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

Why does 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 examines the grassroots workers who upheld 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 their 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Politics, Feminism, Gender, Social Justice

352 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2018

Reviews

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really important perspective that is a nice counterweight to books like "The Good and the Mad" and "She stands at the Door" that talk about angry woman as the face of progress. Angry women (especially mothers) were also the face of white supremacy. women are complicated. This book covers the women that upheld the white patriarchy in the south for many years.

There are some problems with it though. It's a powerful group of stories, but it rarely shifts outward for context or even more data. It's at times really eye-opening to see the role of the women, but it's also obvious that women fought against civil rights. I don't think anyone really thought it was just white men, right? McRae seems to propose that women were on the frontlines of this movement, but that seems to me to be a stretch. They surely were active in PTAs and other female realms, but the legislatures and the levers of power were still male. So how did female power interact with male power during this time? Was it leading or following? Complementing or pushing? Just lots of questions I had as I read it. It's certainly not an easy read. It's pretty gross, actually. And it's ongoing. Just go to any school board meeting in Brooklyn when a white school is about to be merged with a black one.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“. . . viewing schools as an extension of their home and a place where they wielded particular authority, many white segregationist women claimed that because school integration eroded their ability to secure the benefits of white supremacy for their children, it compromised their ability to be good mothers.”

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s Mothers of Mass Resistance is a history lesson on the effects of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka which established that state laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. In backlash, many white christian women, both in the north and the south, became a conduit for de facto segregation in defiance of federal law.

Much like slavery, the racial segregation of schools was couched as a “states rights” issue, circumventing the distasteful tags of white supremacy and white superiority. The work of white segregationist women on the ground eroded the power of Brown vs Board of Education and hampered or inhibited school integration for years.

Lily White Impetus

While conservative male legislators sought to resist desegregation “by all legal means available,” white southern women were much less constrained. They believed they had a gendered responsibility “to protect their children from Negroes,” and they said so in no uncertain terms.

McRae’s chronicle is filled with examples of privileged white women doing horrible things. It sickens me to read about the depths of depravity they would stoop to in order to protect their unjust privileges—but it does not surprise me. There is a lot here from 1954 that is dishearteningly familiar in 2024.

“Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or freedom without responding to the presence of negroes.” -Ralph Ellison, 1964

[Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Redneck Haiku Review

Gathering

In early morning mist
Mama searches Circle K for
Moon Pies and Red Man

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chances are, when you think about prejudice and hate, you picture men--hooded klansmen or angry lynch mobs. But women were also involved in the politics of segregation and racism. This book is an exhaustive study of how women in America's South and North interfered to keep segregation the rule of the day...especially in schools. It offers insight into how attitudes of hatred continue to fester to this day.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected; it was so much more! I was most inflamed by the teachers in the south and how text books were manipulated. It was disgusting, just jaw dropping unbelievable and inexcusable. Sadly a good portion of this book delved into this. I say sadly because that is how I felt throughout this book-sad and incredulous, in denial that this would happen AND a lot more recent than what the reader would expect.

[Tonstant Weader · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...

[Genna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a difficult thing to take a very close look at yourself and at people like you and accept that those people have done terrible things and you have benefited from those things while others have suffered. There's a tendency to say "But I'M not like that," or "But WOMEN aren't like that" and, well, actually often they are and even if you're (I'm) not, you (I) still need to acknowledge that people of color might have damn good reason to be suspicious of your (my) motives. I really appreciated how this book unpacked a lot of things for me that I hadn't really thought about. I'm trying to be better, but part of that is acknowledging what I need to be fighting against in myself and in my community and part of THAT is taking a good hard look in the mirror.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

First-class monograph delving into the deep history of women's involvement with (centrality to) the defense of white supremacy over the middle decades of the 20th century. McRae makes a convincing case that it's a mistake to default to images of redneck racists when imagining the dynamics of white supremacist culture and politics. I was particularly interested in her discussion of how Southern women in the post-Brown vs. Board of Education years developed a race-free discourse of property rights, constitutional limits on federal power, and "morality" that parallels that that was developing roughly contemperaneously in the Southern California suburbs. An important contribution to our understanding of women as activists and of the rise of the right in the 50s and 60s.

[Simona · Rating 3 out of 5]

McRae offers this dense and detailed academic scholarship on the historical role of white women in upholding white supremacy over the last century as a lesson for those of us dedicated to dismantling systems of oppression. I read (err, skimmed) this work as a white woman who knows that it is my responsibility in dismantling white supremacy to get my own people. By examining women's participation as agents and propagators of white supremacy in all sociopolitical spheres (private and public), McRae shows how the way women organized, mobilized for, and enforced white supremacist politics is tied to gendered power structures within patriarchy.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

The topic is extremely important, but it needed better editing to tell a compelling story with a clear through-line to today.

[Carol Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's work is a comprehensive, well-researched treatise on the role white women played in the politics of Southern segregation from the 1920's-1970's. McRae focuses on four women who influenced multitudes of others through their writing and political activism:


North Carolina journalist, Nell Battle Lewis
Mississippi newspaper editor Mary Dawson Caine
South Carolina political activist Cornelia Dabney Tucker
Mississippi columnist Florence Sillers Ogden.

Since I am unable to summarize twelve hours of listening, I will share some facts that resonated with me.

REVIEW

In Bear Mountain, Virginia from the 40's - 90's light-skinned blacks (and possibly some native Americans) paid a lot of money to purchase "white" birth certificates. Changed birth certificates allowed children to attend the better, all-white schools. Monacan Native Americans were forced to identify as black. White bus drivers, teachers, and voter registrars were often the people who determined a person's race and generally upheld Jim Crow and the one-drop rule. See this article on Walter Plecker.

Mildred Lewis Rutherford (1851-1928) was a pro-confederate daughter of a Georgia plantation owner who paved the way for pro-segregationists white women. As the historian general of the Daughters of the American Confederacy, she believed that whites were superior, state governments should dominate schools and social welfare and textbooks should be censored. McRae said she "single-handedly reinvented the South."

Women's suffrage in the South gave a platform to support Jim Crow. McRae described Florence Ogden as a "subversive columnist." Besides being anti-integration she also supported anti-immigration legislation.

Cornelia Tucker's efforts in Charleston, SC led to the rise of Republicans in South Carolina and Eisenhower winning the vote in 1954. She was against European refugees and wanted blacks purged from the Republican party.

Nell Lewis, the first female reporter for the Raleigh News and Observer, considered The Birth of a Nation the best film ever. At the same time that she wanted to end child labor, promote mental health reform, abolish capital punishment, she was also against labor unions since she believed they were pro-Communist. McRae writes that Lewis's stories upheld white supremacy as white women were the "guardians" of racial segregation.

White women were angry with Eleanor Roosevelt for eating with blacks in North Carolina.

During WWII, segregationists feared white women working with black laborers. They wanted to protect workplaces for returning white soldiers.

Cornelia Tucker linked Communism with civil rights. Her battlefield was school textbooks.

Many southern women defended segregation as what "God began and wanted."
They appealed to women's maternal duty to protect their children from mongrelization; there was a pervasive fear of miscegenation.


Many white southern women feared progressive education that included curriculum which studied other nations.Members of the DAR condemned the United Nations.

After the Brown decision in 1954, black parents feared sending their children into white schools that were hostile to their children. They lived with fear, uncertainty, and hope.

In 1956, following the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, North Carolina "patriots" wrote to black families asking them to reconsider going to white schools.

When Emmett Tillett was murdered, one of the women (I believe it was either Nelle Lewis or Florence Ogden) wrote, "There is no outcry. It must not have happened."

Calling upon their duty as mothers, segregationist women thought white schools would prevent interracial marriage and maintain white supremacy. They feared federal court decisions which would challenge their private lives. They blamed the Jews, communists, socialists, and NAACP for integration attempts.

In North Carolina alone, there were 28,000 people who signed petitions against the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

In Virginia and North Carolina "school choice" was a way to avoid integration.

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.

In the mid-1970's Boston mothers who were opposed to busing, looked to southern women for direction. The bus, not the children became central. Complex class politics, working class concerns, and maintaining property rights were central in protecting white privilege for these "true American women."

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the most important book I have read this year. It is informative and shocking the way white women have long played victim for the sake of segregation and redlining.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting subject matter! Writing a bit dense at times.

[Rambling Reader]

Now I understand how Trump garnered more than half of white American women's vote.

[Melissa Michelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really informs current debates about why so many White women support Trump’s GOP. It’s not a new problem, peeps. They have been racists for over a century.

[Angelique · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was a read and a half.

It felt like a text book. I'd probably give it more of 3 stars, but for the amount of work and being readable, I'll give it 4.

I was expecting something a bit more digestible. It can be very dense, especially as the points it's getting across are simple (white women omen upholding white supremacy patriarchy because it's how they define themselves, how the US was fighting the Nazis, despite both taking a page out of the eugenics book, using 'freedom' or 'busing' as an excuse for racism, looking for any excuse for racism, being hateful in the name of 'christian values', rewriting text books, having essay contests, etc.). If anything, I'd want to know more about these specific women she follows, not just what these specific women did.

I was also surprised at the time - I think the time should have been reflected in the title. I was looking for more about now, not then. But I do understand the need to follow history to the civil rights era to understand it.

Besides making me very angry, it made me think about both intersectionality (women were compromising their power for the sake of racism. If they made things better for non-whites, it would be better for them, just like how in WW2 segregation suited companies, as it made it harder to unionise) and white woman feminism's long long history. Although dense and a little dry, if you are interested in this, it's worth a read.

[Rebecca Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excellent book is academic research and, especially in its early chapters, can be slow going. But it's well worth persevering to learn the detailed history of how white women in the U.S. have upheld white supremacy over the last century, especially by asserting control over public education and by adopting the rhetoric of the New Right to make their segregationist views ostensibly race-neutral and therefore more palatable to white moderates. I was particularly grateful to understand the connections McRae makes between white supremacist women's activism and today's insidious "school choice" movement.

"And when white students wrote essays on the value of a segregated society in 1959 or picketed against busing in 1970, white women could claim that they had done their job, as a new generation acted out its lessons in white supremacist politics. White women's constant work at multiple levels of society often took place beyond the historic gaze, and that remains so today. In legal segregation's dying days, its defenders sought to arm it for another political era, ensuring that segregation would outlive its legal collapse." (Conclusion, 240)

[Whitney Archer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I’ve read this year. Highly recommend.

[Stephanie Solis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely informative, but unbearably dry. I got about halfway through it before I ran out of renewals from the library.

[Audacia Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important and compelling history of white supremacy in the twentieth century. In the intro, the author points out that there are many histories of white women in civil rights movement work during this same period, but white women’s significant contributions to perpetuating white supremacy are obscured. This book does that work, naming and documenting white women’s work to maintain segregation in neighborhoods and schools, tracing the political contribution of four different women. The focus on culture making (school textbooks) as well as explicit policy work (school desegregation and busing) puts the domestic and the public spheres in conversation with each other.

[Laurel Starkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book. It is ostensibly about women’s role in upholding segregationist policies. It does an admirable job in that, presenting detailed and well documented case studies. What it does best, perhaps unintentionally, is open up the possibility that our current deep seated schisms, our two Americas, are a result of scholars and cultural analysts not recognizing the impact of continued national ambivalence over racial integration.

Women have always influenced American politics and culture. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae shin

[Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well researched and well written, but horrifying, book. The troubles with people being unkind to one another are much ingrained, and this shows how much harder it will be to route out. We need to know the truth, and that is a good reason to read this.

[Peggy Lavinder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A timely and excellent book that illuminates the often underestimated force of mothers in influencing government policy. Very well researched.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much history I did not know--helped me understand our current political situation and the role of white women in maintaining segregation. A must read for educators, especially white women.

[BMR, LCSW · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually finished this months ago. Brilliant.

Recommended for those who think that masses of White women supporting misogynists and bigots at the ballot box is unique to 45.

[Sugarpuss O'Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book 11 referenced in Sisters in Hate

This is a scholarly look at 4 women who shaped, upheld, & redefined Jim Crow & segregation from the 1920s through the 1970s. The foundation these women laid, along with its terminology, is still being used to this day. For those of you who think white supremacy is just a white man's world, think again. These men have always been led by women. Women are the ones who raised these men, fiercely protected the white world around them, and indoctrinated them to believe wholeheartedly in white over Black. Unfortunately, their progeny is still with us. And after reading 11 books about women like this, I no longer believe this hate will ever die.

[Karen Schnakenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I rated this a 3 because I think the topic -the role of white (primarily southern but not entirely) women - is critically important to understanding today's politics, so I'd rate it a 5 for significance but a 1 for readability because I found it to be a real slog that I had to force myself to keep returning to. It reads much too much like a dissertation, and though it covers very important ground and provides often striking evidence, the denseness of the prose made it difficult for me to remember specifics from one page to another. It would benefit from much more of narrative style or a very thorough editing. And that's a shame because the content needs to be made accessible.

[Janet Frick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book to understand the deep, long-running, and pervasive role that white women have played in advancing and perpetuating white supremacy. A deeply researched book that grew out of dissertation research that the author did for a PhD in history at the University of Georgia. I was particularly taken in (with outrage) at the story of Millie Rutherford, the director of the Lucy Cobb Institute in Athens GA and a long-running champion of women's education, who single-handedly authored dozens if not hundreds of textbooks and pamphlets widely used throughout the south to advance the "lost cause" myth of slavery and the Civil War. I would consider this a must-read for the anti-racism bookshelf, particularly for white women.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

White women are hailed as being righteous or innocent in our culture (self-declared “allies”, phrases like “well behaved women rarely make history” implying female anger=progress, Hillary Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg being touted as heroes without admission of their massive amounts of harm enacted in communities of color; to name a few cultural norms). We forget that we benefit from white men being labeled as the “baddies” because it takes a lot of well-deserved heat off of us. We can say, “Look at how bad they are! We are on your side!”. No, girl.

This nonfiction is a justified history lesson about how white motherhood has directly enacted white supremacy on communities of color. We need not only learn how our specific population group has historically harmed other communities, but also take accountability in the present for how our behavior is propping up these systems of harm. We are just as culpable (white women voted for Trump in droves for a reason) and in need of reckoning and healing.

[Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a careful, damning, and compelling history of white women being “segregation’s constant gardeners.” The author writes in an approachable and erudite manner, and this is a book all white people should read and take very seriously. The aspect I appreciated the most was how it moves segregationist practices and white supremacy out of being purely a southern phenomenon. This is particularly important, and is prescient given the current moment. A must read for sure.