Segregation’s Constant Gardeners: How White Women Created and Defended Jim Crow Segregation

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court released one of its most important and revolutionary rulings: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, usually better known as Brown v. Board. The ruling overturned the infamous ruling in Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that established the ‘separate but equal’ precedent that made Jim Crow discrimination legal. The Brown ruling required that the federal government integrate public schools, bringing white and Black children together to receive equal education. While this story is often told as one part of a progressive and inspiring story about the Civil Rights Movement, a movement for rights that we now sort of all agree was good. But in reality, Brown v Board and the wider movement were met with extreme resistance from white supremacists. While white male politicians like George Wallace got the most attention, they were riding a wave of racism and resistance created and kept alive by white women. Today, for this episode of our latest women’s history series, we’re talking about the white women who fought back against the Civil Rights Movement.

Segregation’s Constant Gardeners: How White Women Created and Defended Jim Crow Segregation

Written by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD

Recorded by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, PhD

Before we start, a quick warning: while we aren’t going to use any racial slurs, the quotes from early and mid 20^th century letters and newspapers we use in this episode use offensive and outdated language. In some places, we’re retaining that language, but we’ll always let you know it’s a quote.

Sarah: Many whites across the American South came to call May 17, 1954 “Black Monday,” – the day that Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren released the ruling in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a decision that was decided 9-0. Many white women turned to their local newspapers to vent their fears and frustrations about the possibility of their white children being education alongside Black children. In Asheville, North Carolina, one woman wrote, “we who have young children … do we want them to grow up and mix socially with Negroes, maybe marry them?” Another wrote,” if you start them together in early grades they will certainly marry.” Another wrote to a far-right newspaper The White Sentinel, “We have no right to expose our helpless children to the danger of race-mixing, which is bound to occur when we accept blacks as being our social equals.”

Elizabeth: Most agreed that the ruling was not actually about education at all, but instead the federal government flexing its muscle and forcing racial integration on the South. Central to their fears was the looming threat of what they referred to with disgust as miscegenation, the term used for interracial marriage and families. One North Carolina mother wrote that Black women and girls were promiscuous, and that that sexual licentiousness would spread to innocent white girls. “In a school close to where I taught school a few years ago, seven of the negro girls had babies – it makes me shudder to even think of my girls being thrown in with negroes.” Another wrote: “I tell you, I did not grow up going to school for negros. Don’t visit with them or make love to them. I am a white woman not a mixed breed. I won’t see my children go into the negro race.” Another was even more explicit, saying it was “a grave danger” for “a little white girl and little colored boy being together at school…which will bring mixed races, mongrels, curs, and everything in general.”^[1]

Sarah: Typically when we learn about the history of the Civil Rights movement, we usually are led to believe that while this vitriol was appalling, it was short lived, and that most of the most virulent resistance burned itself out within a few years when it became clear that integration was permanent. In this episode, though, we’re going to look at things a little differently to consider how white women not only resisted the implementation of segregation, but how their political activism started long before Brown and then continued long after, feeding into rightwing resistance to everything from the perceived spread of Communism to tax reforms. Today, we’re talking about how right-wing, white supremacist women across the American South organized to fight back against desegregtion and the Civil Rights movement.

I’m Sarah

And I’m Elizabeth

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig

PATREON

Sarah: As always, we like to start by acknowledging the sources for our episode. I typically teach my university’s women’s history course every spring, and this year I did some revision to my syllabus and really wanted to find a way to spend some time talking about the backlash against the Civil Rights movement, especially the resistance led by white women. This brought me to Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s book Mothers of Massive Resistance, which I’ve used as the backbone for this episode. There are lots of other books that look at the white backlash to Civil Rights – my colleague Victoria Wolcott who is a really esteemed scholar in the field of race, gender, and Civil Rights suggests that readers might also want to pick up Michelle Nickerson’s Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, which is a really important book in the field but which focuses mostly on rightwing politics in California, so we won’t talking too much about it here. We’re also mostly going to be focused on the backlash rather than the story of Brown v Board, so if you’re curious about the history of the SCOTUS case, you should check out Tikia Hamilton’s Nothing Less than Equality, which traces the development of the case.

Elizabeth: The reaction to desegregation in the South did not come out of nowhere. While it perhaps made the work of white women on behalf of segregation and white supremacy more obvious, it didn’t suddenly appear in the mid-1950s. Jim Crow – the name used to described the laws across the south that established a color line and barred Black Southerners from voting and equal access to facilities from restaurants to public transportation to hospitals – had to be built, protected, and enforced. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, white women were doing work that was critical to establishing the delineation between “white” and “colored” and ensuring its longevity. The first example McRae gives of how white women did this segregation work well before the era of the Civil Rights movement is of Margaret Aileen Goodman in Rockbridge County, Virginia. Goodman was a local registrar tasked with administering the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, a Progressive era law born out of the transcendent science of eugenics that had the world by the throat in the 1920s. The RIA was intended to strictly enforce racial categories in the state of Virginia: anyone with any amount of “non-white blood” was categorized as Black, and barred from marrying a white person. This included Native Americans – who were categorized as Black. There was one exception: because of her critical role in Virginia history, any individuals who could prove that their Native American heritage came from Pocahontas could retain their status as “white” – known as the Pocahontas Rule.

Sarah: The RIA required anyone who was getting married to certify their race. So when William Clark, a Rockbridge County resident from a mixed-heritage community, resisted Goodman’s determination that his family was Black rather than white or Indian, she reported him to Walter Plecker, head of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics and one of the RIA’s principal architects. Rockbridge County is in rural, mountainous western Virginia. While Goodman was certain that there was a clear racial binary and that Clark had obviously violated it, the history of the Clark family and the Rockbridge County regino shows that the RIA was too little, too late. The bureaucracy of racial categorization had changed the family’s race several times – in one census, they were categorized as “mulatto,” for instance, while ten or twenty years later, the census removed that category and only had “white” and “Black” as options. (In that case, the Clark family was recorded by census takers as white.) Sometimes, members of the same family had been categorized as white, Black, and Indian. Chaos! The Clark family had also been fighting against racial classification for literally a century. Various Clarks had successfully challenged an 1823 Virginia law classifying them as mulatto in court in 1845, 1864, and 1875 and each time had been declared white, only to be later be barred from the white school in 1890 despite their legal status, and to face a further petition in 1921 seeking their removal from a local classroom on suspicion of mixed ancestry. Rockbridge and neighboring Amherst County were, demographically, unremarkable — roughly 58 percent white, 36 percent Black, and 8 percent categorized as mulatto or Native American — which underscores that the instability Goodman confronted was not a local anomaly but characteristic of the color line she was asked to enforce.

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, 1924 | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth: Goodman knew to report Clark because of work done by eugenicist scientists Arthur Estabrook and Ivan McDougle, who had done ‘research’ into Virginia’s population. Their data came entirely from white women research assistants. They recruited female teachers to report IQ test scores and observations about their students, and deputized Sweet Brian College (a women’s college) students to compile family histories and conduct interviews across the state. The result was a book called Mongrel Virginians, which argued that “mixed breeding … had rendered a portion of the population less intelligent, less restrained, less industrious, and less moral than their “purer” white or Black neighbors. Race mixing, then, had to be prevented at all costs. Walter Plecker provided county registrars and other administrators a list of common mixed-race families in Virginia, and women like Goodman served as his front-line warriors.

Sarah: Goodman’s role in drawing and then enforcing the color line reflects the important role that women played in maintaining a segregated South. As McRae writes, “in th quest for racial purity, white women constituted both the subjects of racial integrity and its labor force.”^[2] Eugenics and white supremacy, working hand-in-glove, held that white women were the key to preserving racial purity, and so marriage and reproduction were carefully controlled through their bodies. But white women also did the less obvious bureaucratic work of enforcing eugenic laws like the RIA. In the 1920s, 80 to 90 percent of the nation’s elementary schoolteachers were women, and Virginia counted roughly 6,000 registered midwives against only 1,500 physicians. Because women held disproportionate access to “the birthing room, the classroom, and the bedroom” – the places where the racial line was observed and enforced – they became, in the language of the period’s marriage reformers, “gatekeepers of white supremacy.” Women came to this work in a variety of ways. For Goodman, it was because she was a county registrar. Other women, like Louise Burleigh, came to the work through their place in national organizations such as the Anglo-Saxon Club of America, which worked to create and enforce laws like the RIA. As McRae writes, “the women who worked for the Racial Integrity Act demonstrated that Jim Crow was only as strong as its local enforcers.”^[3]

Sarah: Side note: the ASCOA also was invested in demonstrating the superiority of the so-called Anglo-Saxon race through another avenue – preserving the Anglo-Saxon culture that existed through the American South. For instance, in 1931, Louise Burleigh helped to organize the White Top Mountain Folk Festival to celebrate the Appalachian ballad tradition. Another example of how those ballads became key to white supremacy! (Go listen to my murder ballads episode, I worked so hard on it!)

Elizabeth: The second example that McRae gives of white women working to create and protect segregation was through their education work. Georgia educator Mildred Rutherford spent the 1920s campaigning for pro-Confederate, segregationist textbooks and curricula. McRae refers to this education advocacy as an example of what historian Robin Muncy has called “female dominion,” in which Progressive Era women converted their role as mothers into a kind of public authority over things like child welfare, public health, and, in Rutherford’s case, curriculum control, which all could be claimed as outcroppings of a mother’s sphere of influence. Rutherford was the daughter of a Georgia slaveowner and a teacher at a girls’ school. Rutherford was also a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an avowedly white supremacist group that was dedicated to disseminating the myth of the Lost Cause. In 1919, Rutherford warned her UDC sisters that “81 percent of southern schools were using biased, Yankee-authored textbooks that threatened the present-day South….Because of this faiture, white southern students continued to learn a history that minimized states’ rights, put forth slavery as the cause of the Civil War, rejected the secession, glorified Lincoln, and focused on the cruelty and injustice of slaveholders.”^[4] To combat this, Rutherford called on Southern women to help train schoolteachers, endow chairs in southern history, and create textbook selection committees.

Sarah: The campaign for textbooks that adhered to a Southern narrative was already old by the 1920s: a Mississippi legislator called for southern-authored texts as early as 1855, New Orleans parents protested “abolitionist-friendly” material the following year, and former Confederate figures including Vice President Alexander Stephens produced textbooks meant to counter the influence of northern-educated teachers moving south. By 1893, Mississippi’s state government even created an office called the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information, created explicitly to monitor school reading material. Rutherford’s complaint that Yankee history was getting into Southern classrooms was more paranoid perception than reality. In fact, most Americans had already accepted the Lost Cause version of American history. The historian William Dunning at Columbia University, followed by the scholars that studied under him, had developed what became the accepted, mainstream version of Southern history: that slavery was not cruel but beneficial, that the South was the economic driver of the nation, and importnatly, that the Reconstruction period at the Civil War was a failure driven by federal overreach, Yankee corruption and Black inferiority. This version of history had become the accepted interpretation in most American textbooks all around the nation by World War I, and coverage of events such as the massacre of Black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow at the hands of Confederate troops, which had been a staple in textbooks published in the 1870s, had disappeared by 1900. It’s little wonder that Black historian W. E. B. Du Bois wrote sharply that in the United States,“schoolbook narratives functioned as the propaganda of history.”^[5]

Elizabeth: Rutherford built a coalition to control the content of schoolbooks that was broad, drawing support in the 1920s from the Ku Klux Klan, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Perhaps those groups aren’t too surprising, but at times, their textbook crusade was joined by outliers like the American Federation of Labor, who joined Rutherford’s groups to opposed David Muzzey’s The American People. While the Southern, heritage, and white supremacist groups opposed Muzzey’s book because they believed it was too critical of the Confederate cause and its section on the American Revolution had “pro-British socialist tendencies,” labor groups in the North were upset that it upheld the idea of the American Anglo-Saxon as the naturally superior race. Strange bedfellows, indeed, but the result was swift – states like North Carolina stopped using the book.

Sarah: Rutherford gave lectures to UDC meetings and at their summer institutes for teachers. In 1923, she launched a magazine called Miss Rutherford’s Scrapbook: Valuable Information About the South. By this point, Rutherford had so much sway in the adoption of textbooks, southern publishing companies took out ads in the magazine hoping that even just the implication that Rutherford approved of their products would boost adoptions. Rutherford also used the magazine to remind white Southern women of what she called “the Don’ts of History,” where she “instructed her readers to avoid saying “the Civil War’ and instead refer to the it as “the War Between the States” and to say “you know” the South was right, not that you “believe” that it was right. Amid claims that slaves were called servants and were considered members of the family, she also wrote that “the negro of today is far more a slave than he ever was under the Christian institution of slavery in the South.”^[6] Further, she brought her arguments into present day politics, stating that “the South” (by which she meant white Southerners, of course) “cheerfully pays their taxes to educate the blacks, and they encourage education.” That education, she reminded readers, was largely thanks to the KKK, saying that the group – which we today can comfortably call a white supremacist terrorist organization – saved the South. She complained, “justice has never been given the South for what she did at the time and what she is still doing for Negro education.”^[7]

Elizabeth: Rutherford and her allies were wildly successful. In 1941, journalist Mary Elizabeth Carpenter published a study of the “treatment of the Negro” in American history textbooks between 1826 and 1939. In it, she found that most textbooks surveyed “justified the South’s treatment and attitude toward Black Americans,” most included no pictures of Black Americans, most justified the Black Codes and other forms of oppression, and only one – written by Charles Beard – mentioned Harriet Tubman. In 1938, a study by the Mississippi Education Association found that “a student who mastered all the textbooks provided from elementary through secondary school could in all likelihood never meet in his or her reading one Black person who contributed in a significant way to the nation’s development.”^[8] Further, McRae argues that the quest to control textbooks also had two bigger impacts. First, Rutherford trained a generation of white women on “the eternal vigilance needed in maintaining public instruction in Jim Crow.” Rutherford believed that white women were the key to protecting and maintaining Jim Crow and segregation, and they needed to be on high alert at all times for threats to that status quo. Secondly, their work to essentially erase Black history from textbooks took root not just in the South, but across the country. As McRae puts it, “In rendering Black lives invisible in school curriculum, white women perhaps did more lasting damage than the crass negrophobia articulated by the South’s most vitriolic politicians.”^[9]

Sarah: The pivot from massive support to massive resistance turned on World War II, when these institutional channels that white Southern women had built over two decades were redirected against new perceived threats: increasing calls for racial equality during World War II, postwar internationalism and the looming threat of Communism, and the radical disruption of the Brown decision.

Elizabeth: The outbreak of World War II made policng the color line more challenging as the NAACP ramped up its calls for racial justice using Black men’s military service as evidence. If Black men had served well in this critical contest against the Axis Powers, surely they were the equal of white men. Their resulting campaign for equality, branded the “Double V” campaign, called for ‘victory abroad and victory at home.’ Increasingly, the United States’ enforcement of Jim Crow segregation and tolerance of racial violence drew criticism from the international community, and the experience of life in Europe, which certainly was no race-blind paradise but was far different from the Jim Crow South, inspired Black Americans to intensify their efforts for equality. Obviously, this was unacceptable to American segregationists.

Sarah: Southerners, frustrated, turned their frustrations against the Democratic Party. Now, I’m not going to get into the evolution of American political parties during this period – we do have a whole episode on that that I will link in the transcript. But suffice it to say, the Democratic Party had been the party of the South for well over a century – to the point where party insiders referred to the southern voting bloc as the “Solid South.” Now, though, with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, the party’s commitment to segregation was cracking. For many white women, it wasn’t just the New Deal’s tepid integration or expansion of the federal government that best exemplified the failures of the Democratic Party – it was Eleanor Roosevelt. In August 1942, The First Lady made a visit to Salisbury, North Carolina, touring Cannon Mills’ 16,000-worker floor, visiting the YMCA and YWCA, then crossing into an entirely different Salisbury that evening: dinner and conversation with the Black students and faculty of Livingstone College. She had, that same day, also lunched with the town’s very white Daughters of the American Revolution, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Parent-Teacher Association women. This seems pretty standard for a political visit – but Roosevelt’s decision to dine with both white Salisbury residents and cross the color line to dine with the town’s Black residents sent whites over the edge. While white Southerners might begrudgingly accept Roosevelt’s behavior outside of the South, as McRae writes, “having chosen to take interracial dining south of the Mason-Dixon line, the First Lady was an affront to segregation’s customs.” Roosevelt boarded a train back to Washington that night. One resident summed up the local verdict: for the sake of her “colored friends,” the First Lady had “insulted the whole state.”[10]

Elizabeth: This was not the first time Roosevelt’s dinner table had gotten her in trouble with white southern women. The year before, a newspaper columnist named Florence Sillers Ogden had taken her to task in a column over her visit to Harlem Hospital’s graduation ceremony for Black nurses. The hospital, though in the north, was, to Ogden’s mind, participating in upholding segregation by training Black nurses from the South who would return and serve in segregated, Black hospitals. But when Roosevelt visited the hospital for its graduation, Ogden was infuriated when the First Lady spent too much time interacting with the Black graduates. She could have behaved, Ogden wrote, “as a queen . . . condescending to her subjects” — attending, offering warm words, and leaving, the way white southern women themselves handled their occasional appearances at Black churches or funerals. Instead, she had gone home with some of the graduates, met their families, and — in Roosevelt’s own account — “we all had supper.” That meal, to Ogden, was the most unforgivable part. Breaking bread across the color line ranked, in her view, close to interracial sex on the hierarchy of sins against Jim Crow, and she wondered aloud whether the First Lady understood “she is advocating quite another thing for the rest of us.”[11]

Eleanor Roosevelt meets with a Black child in Detroit in 1935 | Fair Use

Sarah: Another newspaper writer, Mary Dawson Cain took the accusations against Roosevelt even further. In October 1942, after three lynchings in Laurel, Mississippi in which two Black teenage boys and one Black farmer were murdered by white supremacist terrorists, Cain published an open letter placing the blame at Eleanor Roosevelt’s feet. Roosevelt, Cain argued, was the “ring leader of . . . racial agitation.” Black Southerners, according to white segregationists like Cain, were happy in the South and embraced segregation as the proper way of things. “The Negro,” she wrote, “is not interested in social or racial equality.” Cain relayed a conversation between a white newspaper publisher and a Black janitor, who, asked whether he belonged to the “Eleanor Equality League,” answered “that lady don’t know her place.”[12] When Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch reprinted the letter and called it absurd, Cain taped the rebuttal to her own office window, so, she said, her Black neighbors could see “how my effort in their behalf was rewarded.”[13] Cain then declared that her Black friends had brought her flowers after she published that letter to thank her and complained that it had been Roosevelt who had “revived the ghosts of the KKK.” Two years later the pattern repeated on a smaller, stranger scale: after Roosevelt sponsored a racially integrated USO canteen where Black and white soldiers and their dates all danced together, segregationists began to speculate that it had been Eleanor Roosevelt who encouraged this unacceptable race-mixing. Two twelve-year-old white girls from rural Louisiana sat down and wrote her a letter of complaint of their own, writing that they would rather be homeschooled than accept any kind of racial integration.

Elizabeth: They were upset with Roosevelt about other threats to the racial status quo in the South. When lucrative wartime defense work in northern factories started to tempt Black Southerners to relocate and abandon their jobs in domestic service for white families, white Southern women blamed Eleanor again. Rumors spread that Black servants were actually forming “Eleanor Clubs,” which they believed were group dedicated to inverting the race system and forcing white women to serve Black women instead. They blamed the racial uprisings in Detroit in the summer of 1943 on her, too. Florence Sillers Ogden wrote that Roosevelt’s disregard for “racial instinct” would “reduce [Black Americans] to dust and tears by her unbounded and unwise ambitions.” Roosevelt was stirring up trouble and “trying to improve on God’s plan” for racial segregation. Even Roosevelt’s advocacy for federal public school funding was a plot for integration: accepting federal money meant the loss of state control over local education. Ogden wrote, “Don’t think for a moment that Federal Aid means anything but control of your schools and your children.”[14]

Sarah: They turned the same anger against the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to improve labor protections. Ogden argued that white women, especiall mothers, needed to fight back against the right to strike. She encouraged readers to write to the Roosevelts on Mother’s Day to invoke their special role as the mothers of soldiers to demand an end to strike protections: “It is a day for the Mothers of America to lift up their voices … and let them be heard. They have the power in their hands to stop strikes and delays in they but act and speak in unison…[Mothers must] demand that labor and industry cease their bickerings; that men work, not 40 hours but if necessary until they fall exhausted as the boys on Bataan fell.”[15] This sense of betrayal from the Democratic party led women like Ogden to try to convince their readers that it was time for a new political home. The Democrats’ promotion of racial equality was like “a heathen mother who throws her child to the crocodile.” Instead, they turned to white southern Democrats who cemented segregation and resistance to New Deal policies into their platform – soon to be called the Dixiecrats – and then eventually outside of the Democratic Party altogether.

Elizabeth: The Cold War gave the story its next turn, and for a moment it looked like it might turn the other way. Initially, when the United Nations was founded in 1945, the South was, improbably, its strongest regional supporter — 90 percent of southerners backed it, more than any other part of the country, and even Mississippi’s conservative Clarion-Ledger applauded American ratification of the UN Charter. Segregationist political organizer Cornelia Dabney Tucker had tried to get herself invited to the founding conference in San Francisco. Columnist Nell Battle Lewis urged her Raleigh readers to embrace the new organization, quoting approvingly the writer Dorothy Thompson’s argument that women were now called to a “dynamic demonstrative energy for the salvation of mankind” through global cooperation.[16] For a couple of years, Lewis’s optimism about international cooperation sat comfortably alongside her segregationist convictions; she saw no contradiction.

Sarah: Then, in 1947, the Communist Party’s Carolina district bought advertising space in Lewis’s own newspaper, calling on “labor, the farming population, the Negro people, professionals, and small business men” to back racial integration and defeat an anti-strike bill. Around the same time, HUAC hearings surfaced testimony that a Communist Party cell was organizing at Lewis’s own alma mater, UNC Chapel Hill, under Junius Scales — a decorated World War II veteran and former Southern Negro Youth Congress officer. Lewis was disturbed that the threat of communism was coming not just from outside sources, but from within their own universities. The moderate who had once cheered the UN now found communism, integration, and internationalism fusing into a single threat — and she was not alone. Anti-communism gave segregationist women everywhere a respectable vocabulary for a fear they already had: that Black organizing for racial equality was never authentic, but rather imported by outside agitators.

Elizabeth: Lewis’s activism against joining the UN pulled in our old friend Florence Ogden, who argued against adopting the UN’s Genocide Treaty, which defined genocide as “a crime which does mental or bodily harm to a member of a racial minority.” Ogden worried that this agreement would make it illegal to even to criticize the NAACP. She wrote: “a Negro, a Chinese, or a member of any racial minority, could insult you, or your daughter. Your husband might shoot him, knock him down, cuss him out. If so he could be tried in an international court. It would also make it a crime to prevent racial intermarriage and intermarriage would destroy the white race which has brought Christianity to the world.” Internationalism was a threat to American and more specifically, local and state cultures – women worried that the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) would change curriculums and work against all that white women had worked so hard to protect. Frances Bartlett, for instance, a longtime conservative writer and activist, created a newsletter called “FACTS in Education” to spread the word to likeminded white women. FACTS stood for “Fundamental Issues, Americanism, Constitutional Government, Truth, and Spiritual Values.”

Sarah: As women influenced politics and public opinion on segregation, some even decided to enter the fray and become politicians themselves. Mary Dawson Cain – that harsh critic of Eleanor Roosevelt – decided to run the Democratic primary for Mississippi governor in 1951. She ran as a hardline segregationist and opponent of the “welfare state.” She wanted to abolish income tax, called for Mississippi to refuse any federal funds and maintain strict state sovereignty, especially when it came to schools, to avoid “bowing the knee to socialism by accepting federal aid to education – the New Deal method of ending segregation in our schools.” Yet, at the same time, she called for women’s rights and wanted gender equality on all part committees, women appointed to policy posts, and women’s place on juries. She called on those vast networks of women that she and others had built up over the years to help her win, but ultimately finished fifth.

Elizabeth: One other fight that Cain stepped into was the movement to resist paying domestic servants social security taxes. In Marshall, Texas, a group of women who shared a bridge club started a political group known as the “Marshall Housewives” to push back on the New Deal’s establishment of Social Security. They claimed the federal government ‘forced them into indentured servitude’ by forcing them to collect 1.5% social security tax on their employees without compensating them for the accounting work they would have to do to comply. The Dallas Morning News reported on the movement, “Back under slavery, of course, every slave holder provided social security for his retired slaves … under the welfare state, Uncle Sam moves in to compel the colored help of East Texas to compel Negro workers to take it out.” Cain took the housewives’ movement and spun it into a cause célèbres, making connections with women around the country who hoped to kill federal income tax and push back on the perceived spread of socialism. The Housewives started to be inundated with mail from women around the country, seeking advice on how to start their own movements.

Sarah: In 1952, Cain, Ogden, and other women repudiated the Democratic party and threw their energies behind Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower wasn’t ideal – they had hoped for the much more hardline Southerner Douglas MacArthur, but he declined to run. Nevertheless, Ogden pledged to “elect Ike all by myself – with the help of women.” Even though Eisenhower was the preferred candidate for many Black Southerners, too, Ogden, Cain and others “predicted that as a reward for a Republican victory, southerners would see a more vigorous effort in rounding up communists and in preserving states’ rights, and in securing white supremacy.”[17] Ogden and Cain worked tirelessly, speaking to women’s clubs and organizations in Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Ultimately, while he won the presidency, Eisenhower couldn’t dislodge the Democratic stronghold in Ogden’s Mississippi, but he was successful in the South, holding five Southern states. Ogden took the loss hard, writing, “Could it be that the Civil War destroyed something fundamental in us? I have wept bitter tears that my own state was weighed in the balance and found wanting. As long as men are men, we are doomed to disappointments.” Yet, Eisenhower’s success in the South was thanks to the hard work of the women that Ogden and Cain mobilized.

Elizabeth: Yet, while Eisenhower had seemed like their best hope, white women were bitterly disappointed within a few years of his presidency. Then came May 17, 1954, the day that Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down the decision in Brown v Board. Segregationists called the dark day “Black Monday.” Brown v. Board of Education meant that within months, Black parents and children in more than sixty southern communities were petitioning to walk their children up the steps of white schoolhouses, and no amount of talk about outside agitators could explain that away. As McRae explains it. “as long as homegrown black resistance was cast off center stage, many white southerners had been able to say that “their” black folks were satisfied, that disaffection with the Jim Crown order was the work of subversive outsiders, and that they knew best how to conduct race relations.” The Brown decision, though, made it impossible to mask the huge amount of civil rights organizing that had been undertaken by Black southerners – nor that that organizing had been successful.

Sarah: The Brown decision, though, also brought the fight over segregation into the exact place where white southern women felt most powerful: their community schools. Now, they doubled down on their roles as protector of children, and made the issue about “family values.” Now, overtly political women like Cain and Ogden could mobilize even larger numbers of women who saw themselves as outside of politics but nevertheless deeply invested in their control over their own children. In this way, the Brown decision had, McRae argues, created “feminized massive resistance.”[18] Florence Sillers Ogden’s first instinct was to reach for the vocabulary that had served her for two decades. Writing to Frances Bartlett, the Californian who had led those anti-communist, anti-UN campaigns against the Los Angeles schools, Ogden called the ruling “the most outrageous seizure of power in all the history of our country” and declared it “absolutely a movement inspired by the Communists.”[19] But other white mothers were less concerned with things like Communist interference and more concerned with what they saw as the real issue issue: the race mixing and interracial sex and marriage that they believed would result from it. An Asheville mother wrote to ask whether her children would “grow up and mix socially with Negroes, maybe marry them.” A letter to the Raleigh News and Observer predicted flatly that children who started school together “will certainly marry.” Letter after letter to Virginia’s Governor Thomas Stanley — the majority of them from women — repeated some version of the same line: “integration encourages miscegenation.” Others worried that Black boys would be sexually aggressive, drawing on the old Southern lie that Black men were pathologically rapacious and bent on raping white women. Still other women wrote to their that Black and white children were not supposed to live alongside one another. A girl from North Carolina wrote, “The difference is not only our skin, but our manner of speaking, thinking, and our ideals. Segregation has too long been established in the South for people to demolish it.”

Elizabeth: Women reached for those old theories about Black inferiority from the era of eugenics to make their point. New Hanover County, North Carolina produced a report that detailed how negative integrated education would be. The report read virtually the same as that 1924 book, Mongrel Virginians: that because of the intelligence gap between Black and white children, white children would be held back. Further, the erosion of segregation would negatively impact housing prices and in the end, degrade race relations. The report argued that “as a result of segregation, Blacks and whites had lived together harmoniously in the South in direct contrast to northern communities where “parents continuously teach racial hatred in order to counteract the influence of proamalgamation teachers.” It was segregated education, they argued, that kept race relations calm and happy, and as a result, kept peace and harmony across the south – a straightforward lie. In Louisiana, a registrar named Naomi Drake spent these same years chasing down family trees and publishing lists of surnames she suspected of hidden Black ancestry, sorting the state’s population by race even as the legal edifice around her began to crack — the same bureaucratic work Margaret Goodman had performed in Virginia thirty years before, desperate to ensure that the color line would remain visible as segregation faced its end.

Sarah: Women scrambled for ways to circumvent the order for integrated education. Textbooks again became a critical piece. Ensuring that the ‘correct’ history was taught in Southern classrooms was vital, Ogden knew that individual textbook adoptions wouldn’t be the concern of the federal government but local and state governments – giving them a way to maintain control over the content students were exposed to. “Even the Supreme Court will find that difficult to prevent,” she wrote. Education also offered a way to bring together all the conservative women’s aims. As Cornelia Dabney Tucker wrote, with the right education would “be far less need for teachers’ oaths, Communist banning, and textbook inquiries when pupils are engaged in powerful program of Americanism.”[20] Anti-communism and anti-segregation went hand in hand. In fact, one women wrote, the very idea that Black Americans were being mistreated was itself Communist propaganda. They believed the NAACP was in league with “the sinister aims of the Jewish Communist revolutionaries…working for a world government.” Ogden called on white women to resist Brown head on, and instead of “slipping up a dark alley or wearing a hood” (a reference to white supremacist terror) urging them to “openly endorse a way of life that has existed from the day of the inception of the United States.”[21] Women wrote and circulated petitions against Brown and sent them to governors and politicians – the governor of North Carolina received 81 petitions signed by over 28,000 people. Whites in Mississippi founded the White Citizens’ Council to work against desegregation. While the group initially refused to accept women, Ogden nevertheless promoted it and urged women to do their part by getting their husbands to join. Eventually, women were accepted into the ranks of the WCCs, and worked on membership drives, organized recruiting events, and planned meetings. The WCC joined a vast network of women’s organizations – the DAR, the UDC, the PTA, and others – that women had used for decades to protect segregation.

Elizabeth: The 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi proved a challenge for white women segregationists. The Till case in some ways encapsulated exactly what many white women had argued would happen with school integration: Black boys predating or even seducing white girls. At the same time, celebrating or even defending the violent death of a child was a bad look, so many white women took to conspiracy and rationalization. Ogden referred to it as a “alleged killing.” Another Mississippi woman wrote that if Till had been murdered, “every responsible white person would find it a horrid crime and miscarriage of justice.” But since that outcry never materialized, she suggested, it couldn’t really be a murder. Others suggested he was “no child,” who did not act in accordance to Southern values – again, the violence was ultimately the fault of outsiders.

Sarah: By the late 1950s, segregation seemed to be slipping out of white women’s hands. The Civil Rights movement was underway. In Mississippi, NAACP leaders announced a drive to register Black voters and Black youth marched for school integration. Texas senator Lyndon Johnson betrayed the South by shepherded through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which created a Civil Rights division in the Justice Department to investigate voter suppression and white supremacist violence. Whites hoped that Eisenhower would reject such insults to the south only to be disappointed when he signed the bill into law. Eisenhower lost even more credence with white southerners when he enforced the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. Nine Black teenagers had spent a year preparing to integrate the high school. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus announced on Labor Day that he would require that the Arkansas National Guard stop them by obstructing the entrance of the school, and told them to stay home. A few days later, a federal judge overruled him, requiring that the students be allowed to access the school. But on September 23, mobs of white residents showed up, screaming and threatening the students as they walked in in the morning. They received so many threats that police snuck the nine students out of the building before the school day was even over. Two days later, President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to walk them into the school, their bayonets pointed at the screaming white mob. Watching federal paratroopers occupy his city, Faubus said simply: “Little Rock has been occupied.” According to McRae, “Little Rock became, for segregationists, the symbol of federal commitment to school integration and a federal betrayal of the rights of white southerners.”[22]

Elizabeth: Segregationist women turned that single sentence into a rallying cry, deliberately echoing a story most white southerners knew by heart, thanks, in part, to their work controlling textbooks: that Reconstruction, too, had been a corrupt federal occupation forced on an innocent South that had its own racial system. Two groups of Little Rock women answered the crisis in two very different registers. The working-class Mothers’ League took to the streets, distributed campaign literature against moderate school board candidates, and passed the license-plate numbers of integration-friendly mothers to sympathetic state police; when the city voted in 1958 on whether to close Central High rather than keep integrating it, 19,470 of 27,031 Little Rock residents chose closure. The middle-class Women’s Emergency Committee took the opposite path, working through business contacts and civic clubs to argue that shuttered schools would frighten off investment; they lost that first battle, when the school did in fact close for the 1958-1959 school year, but ultimately won the war when Central High reopened for good in 1959.

Sarah: From Mississippi, watching all of it, Ogden reached again for her familiar comparison, denouncing federal intervention as akin to “the tyrannical methods of the Reconstruction Era, and of the dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin” — and then, again, told her readers where the fight would be won from here on. It would not be won by the old generation. It would be won, she said, by raising a new one: segregationist women and their children were, in her words, “the hope of the nation.” Again, she pointed white supremacists to history education as a key tool for winning the long game. White Citizens Councils sponsored essay contests on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the benefits of segregation. In 1961, the Civil War centennial was another opportunity to emphasize the Southern version of its own history. While Black Americans were sitting in at lunch counters and leading boycotts, Southern whites held parades full of men in Confederate uniforms and women in hoop skirts. (Side note: I am no naïve newb when it comes to the Lost Cause and its long tendrils, but I promise you I did not choose this book in order to talk about Civil War memory! It’s a testament to how powerful the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction were in the South for creating and maintaining the racial order.)

Elizabeth: The integration of the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans by first grader Ruby Bridges inspired white women again to come out in force. Wearing aprons and carrying their babies, white women screamed at Bridges as she climbed the steps into the school. While media depicted them as ‘crazy,’ these women saw themselves as fulfilling their role as good mothers protecting their children, and within the larger context we’ve seen in this episode, their actions seem completely rational and explainable. These women, McRae argues, didn’t believe that their mob tactics would change the law or influence the Supreme Court, but that they could affect their own school and neighborhood. They intimidated the Bridges family and bullied white families who failed to pull their white children from the school. Some white women, though, hoped to channel that anger into more focused efforts that didn’t invite media scrutiny. Some, like local history teacher Sara McCorkle, worked to develop an organization inspired by integration to “fight for our American way of life.” The organization, called the Paul Revere Ladies, had a rallying cry: “The hour is late! There is no time to spare!/ The enemy is upon us from land, sea, and air/ Washington has been taken, Little Rock has been occupied/The battle of New Orleans is raging nationwide/As the price of freedom/In the graves our father lie/We in turn must save our children – / We must stand, and fight, or die.”

Sarah: In September 1962, the crisis moved to Oxford, Mississippi, home to the University of Mississippi, often nicknamed “Ole Miss.” Governor Ross Barnett had spent the summer promising, on the radio and again at an Ole Miss football game, that “no school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your governor” and that the state would “not drink from the cup of genocide.” (Again, invoking the idea that desegregation fit into that UN definition of genocide.) Barnett had already burnished his segregation credentials. Just a year earlier, he had jailed 328 Freedom Riders, the civil rights activists who took buses into the south to try to advocate for their desegregation of interstate bus travel, a decision that made Mississippi look barbaric in national media. His promise was broken, though, on September 30, when Air Force veteran James Meredith arrived to enroll at the University of Mississippi and a riot engulfed the campus, sending white parents racing to Oxford to pull their own children out from between federal troops and the mob. Cornelia Dabney Tucker wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy insisting the violence was the government’s fault, not the students’, who she said were “motivated by what they believe to be a noble and heroic determination to preserve the integrity of the races,” and rewrote the recent past to claim southern colleges had already been “quietly” integrating before Washington forced the issue.

Elizabeth: But the more consequential response came from between 1,500 and 1,800 women across eight states, including California, who organized as Women for Constitutional Government (WCG) to oppose what they called “federal invasion” of Mississippi. What made the WCG different from Ogden’s or Tucker’s earlier crusades was what its charter left out: its seven founding goals — defeating communism, defending free enterprise, upholding constitutional government, resisting the UN — did not include white supremacy or racial segregation. Members were coached explicitly to “stay off the racial problem except in our own localities” when recruiting by phone. Ogden, one of its chief organizers, told chapters to “organize, organize, organize . . . in every county, every city, every village, and every hamlet,” building outward from Mississippi into a national network that no longer needed to say in such specific terms what it was defending. According to its founding documents, the WCG believed it was woman’s responsibility to “preserve the good life for her children – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Protection of the family. This is a woman’s medium. We have every right to fight for it; every incentive. If the men fail, we shall carry on. We are the mothers of men. We are the builders of the future. We have a duty to perform. Let’s be up about it!” The WCG had found, without quite announcing it, the language segregation’s defenders would use for the rest of the century, long after segregation was technically dead and the fight had spread far beyond the South: not the language of race, but of the Constitution, parents’ rights, and family values. These would, McRae argues, become the talking points of the New Right – parental authority over the home, over matters of moral and sex education, and over academic education.” Instead of being explicit about their desire for racial segregation, now they couched those desires in broader, more euphemistic language.

Elizabeth: And the issues that white Southern women had spent decades resisting did soon become national, not regional concerns. Florence Sillers Ogden made her prediction in 1964, in a column for Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger: when the North eventually faced its own “forced” integration, she wrote, northern whites would behave much like their southern kin. This was not just anger or an idle guess. For decades Ogden had corresponded with women in the DAR and other national women’s organizations, and she knew from that correspondence that women across the country were already organized around a shared set of conservative causes, of which opposition to civil rights was only one strand. For the next eight years she kept watching, noting each new sign of northern and western resistance, confident that white supremacist politics was not a regional phenomenon but a national one. When northern cities like Boston faced their own crisis about integration, Ogden’s broke fully into public view in the 1970s, she was proven right.

Sarah: By then the country’s segregation problem had outgrown the south. Rural southern counties were still fighting over school desegregation, but now, so were cities like Detroit and was Boston, cities that had no Jim Crow statutes on its books at all. In Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, more than 90 percent of Black students attended schools that were over half Black — a level of separation that rivaled anything in the rural South, achieved without a single explicit segregation law. The distinction Americans liked to draw between the South’s de jure segregation, meaning segregation that was created and enforced by laws, and the North’s supposedly organic de facto segregation, segregation that was produced by ‘fact’, things like city planning and housing policy, was one that southern segregationist women had never taken seriously. They had spent decades learning that laws alone did not sustain Jim Crow — they knew that culture, custom, and administrative practice had to do just as much work as the statute books because they had been doing it for decades, and that a “race-neutral” policy applied unevenly could segregate a school system as effectively as a law that named race outright The country’s political leadership briefly confronted this same argument in 1970, when Mississippi Senator John Stennis proposed a law that would impose desegregation across the entire nation, and Connecticut. Senator Abraham Ribicoff rose to agree with him: “If segregation’s bad in Alabama, it’s bad in Connecticut. A child in the third grade who goes to an all-black or all-white school – whether in Mississippi or New York City – has not the slightest idea that there is a difference between de jure and de facto.” The Senate’s response was to let the proposal die.

Elizabeth: The courts, unlike the Senate, forced the issue. In Detroit, Judge Seth Roth ruled in Bradley v. Milliken that school district boundaries which created all-white and all-Black schools were “simply matters of political convenience” that could not be used to shield a metropolitan area from desegregation. In Charlotte, North Carolina, Judge James McMillan went further still in a case called Swann v. Mecklenburg ordering busing across the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system after the NAACP demonstrated that school-assignment rules — not simply where families happened to live — had placed at least 10,000 students in schools other than the ones nearest their homes. The ruling exposed something segregationist women had always privately understood and the wider public had overlooked: what passed for “natural” neighborhood segregation was actually the result of policy — things like redlining, federal loan practices, urban renewal, highway routing — all passing as simply accidental or circumstantial.

Sarah: Charlotte’s white response formed around the Concerned Parents Association, publicly fronted by three men but built and sustained by the daily organizing of white mothers. One of them, Mrs. Charles Warren, insisted she had no objection to Black families moving into her own neighborhood and she would welcome their children into her children’s school. But busing her white kids across town for the sake of integration was another matter entirely: “if anyone thinks they’re going to bus my children across town . . . without a fight, they’re dreaming.”[23] (Of course, ignoring the fact that some Black kids were taking multiple city buses across cities to get to their schools regularly.) At a CPA rally that September, fellow organizer Jane Scott went further, arguing that a mother’s duty to protect her children’s innocence outweighed any obligation to obey the law. But neither of these woman stopped the buses. Charlotte integrated, and for a time became a model of how busing could break residential segregation’s grip on public schools.

Elizabeth: A parallell fight was breaking out the same decade in West Virginia, but focused on books rather than buses. In Kanawha County, a white transplant from Mississippi named Alice Moore won a seat on the local school board and turned it into a platform against a newly adopted, more racially inclusive language-arts curriculum, which she and her allies denounced as “anti-American” and as teaching children “ghetto language’ and atheism.[24] The protest metastasized beyond the school board: parents kept roughly a quarter of Kanawha County’s children home from school, boycotted local stores, staged wildcat strikes, and shut down the city bus system entirely. The White Citizens’ Council press recognized a kindred cause and covered the controversy approvingly. Their periodical published an article that read, “in the pages of their childrens’ school books are false doctrines which will encourage their white sons and daughters to merge their racial identities with those of Blacks in every phase of social life.”[25] More alarmingly, both the KKK and William Pierce, the leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, traveled to West Virginia to lend support to the boycotters. What had begun as a fight over reading lists carried, underneath it, the same fusion of ideas that had animated Ogden, Cain, and Tucker a generation earlier — maternal authority, national identity, and the defense of a racial order — now relocated to a state that had never had Jim Crow statutes of its own.

Sarah: But it was Boston – a city in a state known for its supposed liberalism and opposition to slavery and white supremacy – supplied the last and most public chapter of this national story. For nearly a decade before Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered citywide busing in 1974, the Boston School Committee, led by Louise Day Hicks, had used the city’s network of Home and School Associations to stall compliance with the state’s Racial Imbalance Law, passed in 1965 to better integrate schools. Schools could delay integrating by requesting judicial review, and the Home and School Association planned on using that slow pace to essentially stonewall the process. During this time, the Home and School Association, led by women like Louise Day Hicks, had used the delay to build up a grass roots opposition. When Garrity’s order finally came, the resistance that met it had been nine years in the making. Several hundred mothers had already organized in 1972 under the banner of the Concerned Parents League, pressing the city for repeal and framing their objections, publicly, around “parental rights” and “freedom of choice” — though one of their own members later admitted she had been startled by “the virulent racism” she heard expressed at their meetings. Their letters to Judge Garrity mostly avoided that overt racism and instead used the language that southern moderates had perfected two decades earlier: that this was an issue not about racism, but about taxpayer rights, neighborhood tradition, the authority of a parent to choose her own child’s school and mode of transportation. As one female South Boston student wrote, she was “for equal rights, but against busing,” and another wrote, “I am not a bigot or racist. I believe in choice.”

Elizabeth: Hicks herself organized Restore Our Alienated Rights — ROAR — and was direct about what she believed was at stake: “the issue of forced busing is a women’s issue.” Others described ROAR’s rank and file less charitably, as “militant mothers” whose activism ran from prayer vigils to the shouting of racial epithets at Black children arriving at school. Many of Boston’s white residents insisted, all the same, that their fight had nothing to do with the South’s. Their schools were segregated by neighborhood, not by law; one mother put it plainly: “Boston is not like the South. Colored people . . . were never forced to the back of anything in Boston.”[26] Southern segregationists were not fooled by the distinction. Southern radio and television stations offered their sympathy to Boston’s resisters as fellow victims of federal overreach, recognizing in ROAR’s mothers the same fight Ogden had predicted a decade before, arriving exactly where she said it would.

Sarah: McRae’s central argument in this book is that building, maintaining, and defending segregation in the United States was the work of women. As she writes, “Stretching our understanding of massive resistance to address the persistence and shape-shifting qualities of the politics of white supremacy means understanding that the grassroots politics of white supremacy means understanding that the grassroots politics of massive resistance was a women’s movement.” Women did the boots on the ground work of defining what it meant to be white or Black, of policing what white children would learn in school in order to ensure a future for white supremacist thought, developed networks through their reactionary columns and magazines, and flew into action in an attempt to stop the integration of their children’s schools, arguing that only mothers had the right to determine what was right for their own children. As I was writing this episode, the one thing I kept coming back to was this: these white women worked diligently for years to put down deep roots for white supremacy, roots that were ultimately so successful that they became largely invisible. Those roots grew in myriad directions – listen to Elizabeth’s episode, for instance, about Phyllis Schlafly, for one way that these logics and networks were used to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. You can see it, too, in Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon’s ‘southern strategy,’ which used those euphemisms to win the votes of frustrated segregationists, and in the War on Drugs, which developed different sentencing laws for drugs based on the race of their most common users. And those roots are still bearing fruit right now. Why are we continually surprised that in a country where those white supremacist roots have been so diligently tended and so carefully hidden within euphemisms like “family values” and “parents’ choice,” that white supremacy continues to grow and bear fruit in our own lives?

Bibliography

McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Notes

^[1] Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018), 169-170.

^[2] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 25

^[3] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 37.

^[4] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 41.

^[5] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 44.

^[6] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 52.

^[7] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 53.

^[8] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 57.

^[9] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 60.

[10] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 111

[11] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 112

[12] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 113.

[13] McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 114