Summary: An investigation of how White women drove policy around segregation and worked to uphold it in their daily lives.
In studying history, there are always different facets to explore. As I study the history of the civil rights movement, I have tended toward big picture history and then the history of significant figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Stokley Carmichael, and Ella Baker. And then I read about less well-known figures like Charles Person and the Atlanta Five. These are worthwhile subjects for studying and important facets of understanding history. But another part of studying history is to study “the villains,” not just those we consider heroes from our vantage point. In the case of the Civil Rights Era, it is vital to study not just those that worked to end segregation but those that worked to uphold segregation. Several months ago, I read the very helpful book, The Bible Told Them So, about the theological defense of segregation in North Carolina. The Mothers of Massive Resistance is in that same category of history.
Massive Resistance was a term coined by Senator Harry Byrd in response to Brown v Board of Education. It was a strategy to disrupt integration through vocal and broad resistance to all aspects of integration. Massive Resistance was centered primarily around educational integration but expanded to other areas. The Mothers of Massive Resistance has a simple thesis that white supremacy (the belief in a racial hierarchy with those classified as white at the top) required active participation by white women. It traces the 50-year history of the Civil Rights Era (the 1920s-1970s) and how white women, in their more restrictive and gendered roles, were both drivers and upholders of that white supremacy.
In simple terms, this is easy to understand. White women, in gendered work and home roles, were the front line of the enforcement of the color line. Nurses classified babies into racial categories (categories that were fluid and changed over time.) Women office workers in government upheld segregated rules and identified violaters of the segregated cultural or legal norms. Teachers taught in ways that maintained racial hierarchies before and after official segregation ended, including passing on the mythology of racial hierarchy through history and cultural transmission.
Too often, older histories of the Civil Rights Era were oriented toward telling a solely southern story. Recent histories like A More Beautiful and Terrible History give a more full history of the era by including the more subtle but often more long-lasting ways that northern segregation resisted integration. In many ways, the northern resistance was the most successful front of Massive Resistance. School integration efforts ultimately failed in many northern school districts that tended to be smaller. Changing district boundaries following residential segregation boundaries was an effective method to prevent school integration, especially for those schools that resisted integration until the mid-1970s when federal integration efforts were largely abandoned, and the courts overturned bussing plans, especially those plans that crossed district boundaries.
What is more important to me about books exploring the segregationist sides of the civil rights era is understanding the origins of rhetoric and how overt segregationist and white supremacist rhetorics subtlely changed to colorblind but still segregationist-oriented language. For example, in the 1950s, there was overt use of the good of “White Supremacy” using that term. By the 1970s, the rhetoric had shifted to safety, school quality, and the character of neighborhoods. Since the 1970s, the rhetoric has not changed much, and with historical context, it is easy to see how very similar phrases track over time.
In the 1990s, Democrats reached out to “soccer mom” to expand their coalition. But after 2001, those soccer moms became “security moms” and shifted their voting to republican national candidates. (I am drawing on a podcast and article by Melissa Wear for some of these ideas.) This parallels thoughts in Mothers of Massive Resistance about how many women were upholding white supremacy in response to fears of communism. The rise of communism and the cold war and the ways that the civil rights movement was labeled as communist by segregationists as a means of stoking fear is very much similar to both the CRT debates today and the post-9/11 anti-immigration rhetoric of the early 2000s. Knowing the history makes it easy to assess how these fears are stoked. But the pressures of motherhood and the fears of not being a “good-enough” mother (or father) continue. Even today, many white parents express support theoretically for school and community racial integration but only on limited terms.
I regularly talk about how my kids go to the school where my wife teaches, not the one they are zoned for. The school is about 12-15 minutes from our home, depending on traffic, but it is in the same school district. The school my children attend is 90% minority (primarily Black and Hispanic, but some Asian as well) and about 70% low-income. About a half mile away, there is another elementary school in the same school district. That school has 11% Black or Hispanic students and 7% low-income students. The boundaries have been stable for decades and are primarily upheld by residential zoning. My kids’ school boundaries are almost entirely multifamily units, mostly apartments, while the other school is almost entirely detached single-family housing. Even today, it is primarily the role of women that upholds school and housing policies. While overt racial concerns rarely maintain those boundaries, other issues like property values and school quality continue to dominate the rhetoric around the maintenance of boundaries that have their roots in the segregated era.
It is less ‘encouraging’ to read books about segregationists. Still, it is helpful to unmask the origins of our current problems to look back to history and see the forces that shaped the current context.
Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook