White supremacy is intimate, which explains why reactions to school integration can be visceral. For white parents in the Jim Crow South, school integration conjured images of white daughters dating, marrying, and having sex with black men. Others fretted young children would witness white teachers treating black children with tenderness. Would white children be expected to obey black teachers? Or, as white teacher Pat Watters wondered, was it possible that when first graders lined up for their good-bye hug on the last day of school, “a black seven-year-old would expect a hug just like his white classmates” (p. 173)?
Given the intimacy required to maintain the color line in America, it is little surprise that women have played a central role in its production and reproduction. In Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae examines women as the “constant gardeners” of massive resistance (p. 19). McRae argues that to fully understand the rise of massive resistance to black civil rights after 1954, we must expand our interpretive framework to include both white female segregationists in the early twentieth-century South and their conservative allies nationwide, especially women, through the 1970s.
McRae's central argument is that a large and diverse cadre of women, mostly southern, but eventually many in the North as well, dedicated themselves to policing the everyday aspects of white supremacy in America. As nurses and county registrars, for instance, southern women were tasked with policing the racial identities of newborn babies, schoolchildren, and people applying for marriage licenses. As teachers, they taught a racialized conception of citizenship, and as journalists, they heaped censure on books, plays, and films that contained any hint of racial tolerance. As mothers, they instructed their progeny in the vital importance of treating black people with cold, calculating disdain. The fact that women had a gendered authority as mothers, educators, and caregivers opened crucial spaces for them to fortify white supremacy through small acts with potentially significant consequences.
It was as mothers that white segregationist women could claim the most powerful mantle of moral authority, and as McRae shows in this book, white women recognized this power, fine-tuned it, and wielded it like a fiery sword. Following the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the female architects of massive resistance insisted that any woman who allowed the state to force her children to attend school alongside black children was a failed mother. It was a mother's duty to protect her children, therefore, it was white women's moral obligation to resist even token school integration. They heaped scorn on neighbors who advocated a more moderate position. God help any man, especially any male politician, who dared to thwart a mother's sacred duty to protect her children, her family, and her home. This rhetoric proved to be appealing, malleable, and extremely effective.
Mothers of Massive Resistance is organized into two parts, each with four thematic chapters, cleaved in half by World War II. McRae investigates the reproduction of white supremacy in four areas: social welfare policy, such as designating race on a birth certificate; public education, such as fighting to ban textbooks; electoral politics, such as rallying voters against the welfare state; and popular culture, such as promoting a particular film. At the heart of the narrative are four educated and politically active southern women: Nell Battle Lewis, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker.
These four women provide a good chance to mine the lifework and evolving ideals of segregationist women, and McRae does a good job showing how these women worked to shore up white supremacy in myriad ways. But they hardly seem typical, and it is not clear how representative they are supposed to be of the larger group of southern white segregationists that are at the heart of McRae's thesis. Lewis, for instance, came from a wealthy family, attended Smith College, served overseas during World War I, and then returned to North Carolina, where she worked as a professional journalist for two prominent newspapers. Tucker, a young widow and mother of four in Charleston, was an outspoken critic of the Democratic Party during the New Deal era. Many of the things these women said and did seem more extraordinary than ordinary. For instance, Tucker created a dress and hat out of newspaper articles advocating a secret ballot in 1939, and then sported this outlandish outfit as political protest (see photo p. 82). Cain, who owned and wrote for a local newspaper in Mississippi, ran for governor of Mississippi in 1952 on the Democratic ticket and advocated the sanctity of states’ rights until her death in 1984 (see photo p. 152).
Other actions were more mundane, and as McRae documents here, white southern segregationist women organized PTA meetings, petitioned school boards, lobbied politicians, organized essay contests, and generally insisted that their vile acts of white supremacy represented the pinnacle of Christian love. Although capable of blatant dissembling, female segregationists were savvy, and they quickly learned to modify their language and behavior to remain politically viable as the black civil rights movement gained national support. Thus, they ceased their apocalyptic predictions that school integration would lead to white girls having sex with black men and started touting the absolute necessity of states’ rights, limited government, and school choice. White southern women were not antiblack, they proclaimed as they picketed school integration, they were merely doing God's work as anticommunists. McRae demonstrates that these white women paved the way for the rightward shift in American politics in the late 1960s, especially growing national resistance to black civil rights as school integration shifted north. In the conclusion, McRae evaluates the rabid antibusing mothers in Boston and Pontiac, Michigan, who relied on exactly the same coded language, persuasive logic, and tactics developed by white southern segregationists.
Mothers of Massive Resistance is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the rise of the New Right and American conservatism, and it gives both women and public schools a starring role. She takes many themes that historians of education know well, such as school integration, battles over textbooks, eugenics, and the role of schools in perpetuating ideas about race and citizenship, and puts them into a broader framework that reveals a fuller range of women's work as moral guardians and frontline activists. That is why, for instance, McRae finds southern segregationist women advocating for school prayer and against sex education. Their primary motivation was not religious fervor—it was to resist state intervention into intimate details of everyday life, including, always, school integration. It is also helpful to see that female segregationists played multiple roles in these educational battles, for instance, a woman could be a mother, a teacher, a journalist, a homeowner, and a political candidate and draw on each of these identities to advocate for educational reform.
This is an ambitious and well-written book, and McRae makes a 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.
