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    Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
    Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
    Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
    Audiobook11 hours

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

    Written by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

    Narrated by Kirsten Potter

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.


    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 31, 2018
    ISBN9781541445963
    Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy

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    Reviews for Mothers of Massive Resistance

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    • 5/5
      Those who love peace must learn to organize as well as those who love war. Highly recommended to understand the modern landscape of school segregation and the struggle against civil rights. Segregation's constant gardeners denied opportunity, mobility, and quality of education for the U.S.'s disenfranchised groups by weaponizing their womanhood and motherhood, using propaganda in media and social groups to secure White supremacy for generations of Americans. Echoes of this dark history haunt us in not only results, but national rhetoric, serving as a stark warning.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Incredibly interesting, learn something new every day! Highly recommend
    • 5/5
      Depressing but important: white women did the day to day work of implementing and defending white supremacy throughout the 20th century. Initially, white women worked as registrars and social workers (classifying people by race and denying whiteness and other benefits to the undeserving) and teachers (ensuring that children learned the naturalness of white supremacy and the tragic consequences of northern intervention into the South’s peculiar institution). They implemented segregation and white supremacy at the local level, even if we mostly remember the male politicians who purported to lead the charge. Later, when desegregation became a legal mandate, white women worked on electoral politics and popular culture to fight back. Southerners made white allies all over the country, building the foundations for a larger movement of white backlash that would use deracialized language to fight government “overreach.” Claiming the special right to defend domesticity and intimacy—especially against interracial sex—white women insisted that they were working for the good of (white) children, thus justifying their public participation. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited North Carolina in 1942 and lunched with black men and women, rather than just sweeping in and out of a black college like a benevolent better, no white woman would host her overnight: she was an existential threat. White motherhood required policing against interracial sex, which was inherently suggested by interracial dining. They also blamed Eleanor Roosevelt for rumors about how WWII would get black women out of white women’s kitchens and force white women to be subordinate to black women. In a standard move, they made her an outside agitator: “By naming these underground activities ‘Eleanor Clubs,’ white southern women were able to recast what was black women’s rising labor independence and more generally an emerging, powerful civil rights campaign as the work of a white female authority figure.”White segregationist women led the charge to leave the Democratic party because, unlike white men, they didn’t have “party perks and election deals” to lose when charging it had betrayed its racist ideals. They adopted a domestic anti-communism linking segregation, anti-United Nations activism, oversight of white children’s education, “and the policing of seemingly benign outsiders polluting communities with incindiary ideas.” Of course, anything homegrown, like student activists at UNC, was misguided and misled—turns out those attacks on UNC for liberalism go a ways back (“North Carolinians never intended to pay taxes ‘on a nest for Muscovite fledglings’”) though they’ve recently undergone a resurgence. And in the end, the protection of white children/white womanhood was about sex: one of McRae’s central subjects, a political activist/newspaper writer, ends up screaming at her slightly more liberal editor, “I hope all your daughters have n---- babies,” which is pretty much what the segregationist position reduced to. McRae points out that white women spent less time on scaremongering about rape than white men did—they were more concerned about consensual interracial sex. Segregation was always about the fear that intimacy would be unencumbered by racial hierarchy: “When Pat Watters’s lone black second grade student stood in line for his hug on the last day of school, Watters remembered being stunned that a black seven-year-old would expect a hug just like his white classmates.”The lessons of massive resistance also point to the limited potential of compromise: a number of McRae’s subjects started out as Southern white “liberals” in the sense that they condemned lynching and advocated for limited amounts of equality, for example in improving black schools. But after Brown declared desegregation to be the law of the land, they stopped their protectiveness, refusing to condemn the murder of Emmett Till. And when parents kept their children out of school or closed down schools, they taught their children “that preserving whiteness and racial segregation mattered more to their parents than a high school diploma, a college scholarship, or even Friday night football.” And, McRae notes, white children “who heard the shouts of ‘school choice’ in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s became the parents on the left and the right who witnessed and supported the rise of ‘school choice’ in the 1990s.”