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. ( )

Incredibly interesting, learn something new every day! Highly recommend ( )

It's a well-researched, well-written, thoroughly depressing tale of how (white) women can also be gigantic assholes, we just didn't notice because we weren't paying attention to how that crap got done. ( )

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.” ( )

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.wordpress.com/2018/02/24/9780190271718/ ( )