Rallying Behind Racism

The Women of White Supremacy

10.18.19

White supremacy has been in the news a lot recently. It is often seen as a movement at the fringes of American society, and discussion of it rarely includes white women. But women play a critical, if overlooked, role in the white supremacy movement, and examining their involvement shows it to be far less fringe than many think. So on this episode of BackStory, Brian, Nathan and Joanne dig into the little known history of white women and white supremacy.

This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this {article, book, exhibition, film, program, database, report, Web resource}, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Women of White Supremacy Lesson Set

Download the full lesson set.

In the wake of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, there has been an increased awareness of white supremacy in the national discourse. However, white supremacy movements have existed in the United States since the founding of the country. Following the abolition of slavery, white supremacy groups fought for continued segregation with Jim Crow laws. Historians have often focused on the role of men in shaping the national narrative of white supremacy. However, this lens ignores the contributions of white women throughout history who fought to maintain racial hierarchies.

This lesson, and the corresponding BackStory episode, focus on the women of different white supremacy movements throughout American history. Far from being innocent bystanders, women frequently took an active role in trying to preserve the status quo of racial inequality. The episode discusses white supremacy in three different contexts: slavery during the 19th century, during Jim Crow-era segregation, and today. Because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, some elements of this lesson plan may be difficult for some students to hear and discuss.

Listening Notes By Hayley Duncan , Middle School Social Studies Teacher, Lake Lure Classical Academy

Download the listening notes.

Segments

Photographing a Movement

Glenna Gordon is an award-winning documentary photographer who has spent years taking portraits of women in the white supremacist and far right movements. She says white women play a critical role in supporting the white supremacist movement and we ignore them at our peril.

Music:

Get Out by Jahzzar
Sketch (Vlad) by Jahzzar
Lucky Stars by Podington Bear

Women’s Klu Klux Klan (WKKK); photography; racism; white supremacy

View Transcript

Announcer: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week, along with our colleague, Ed Ayers, we explore a different topic in American history.

Joanne Freeman: Today we’re talking about a difficult issue, so just a disclaimer here, some things in this episode might be troubling for some people to hear.

Glenna Gordon: If you think white supremacy is only the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross or white men in khaki pants and white polo shirts marching before Charlottesville, then you’re getting it wrong.

Brian Balogh: This is Glenna Gordon. She’s an award-winning documentary photographer, and she’s spent a lot of time covering women in the far right and white supremacist movement.

Glenna Gordon: Some of my portraits, some people find some of them difficult. Some people find some of them upsetting, because not everybody looks like a meth head from Tennessee joining the Klan, which is what I think a lot of people think people on the far right look like. And people can sometimes be really surprised when they see my portraits and they just look like another pretty girl from another town. Others of my portraits, I hope, are a little bit layered and will show people in a way where I want the image to do the talking, so [crosstalk 00:01:43].

Brian Balogh: Glenna says the far right and white supremacist movement can’t function without women. Case in point, a woman Glenna met in Charlottesville, Virginia after the deadly Unite the Right rally in August, 2017. It all started with an invitation to a party from white supremacist leader Richard Spencer.

Glenna Gordon: It was like a VRBO or some other sort of vacation rental house that was being rented by Identity Evropa, which was Spencer’s group, was one of the more active groups responsible for Charlottesville. And this is seven hours after Heather Heyer has been killed and after the day’s events. There was probably about 100 to 150 people at this party that I show up at. It’s mainly men. I’d say it’s like a 10-to-1 ratio of men to women, but I’m there to meet some of the women who are in leadership in Identity Evropa.

Glenna Gordon: A really good example of this is a woman like Erica. Erica, who asked me not to use her last name, and those were the terms of the interview, so I will not use her last name, she has been active in IE, it used to be IE, now it’s the American Identity Movement, for years, and she’s a known organizer. When you think about what happened the day of Charlottesville, you think about Heather Heyer dying, but there’s a lot of other people who are responsible for that day. Someone like Erica, in the lead-up to Charlottesville, she’s posting on Discord, which is an app that people are using to communicate and plan, and she’s helping people organize riots. She’s hosting the party. She’s walking around the party to make sure that nobody’s trashing this rental house. Women do women’s work in these groups. They are not necessarily leadership front and center, because that’s the role of men, but they are making sure everything happens.

Glenna Gordon: Another example of that is this woman Amanda Barker, who I met in North Carolina, who’s the wife of a Klan leader, and so she’s called Imperial Commander Amanda. Even though her husband Chris is the one putting up the cross and setting it on fire, she’s the one organizing the carpools for everybody to get there, organizing the potluck beforehand. And why are people going? They’re going to burn a cross, but they’re also going to have a potluck and to hang out with the people who they believe share their identities and have their backs.

Glenna Gordon: And so somebody like Amanda is making sure that that happens. She’s also the one addressing all of the mail that goes out when people call and leave their address on her hotline. She’s doing labor to support this group, even though people think of Chris as the leader. Alone, he could not run one of the most active chapters of the Ku Klux Klan in America. He needs her to actually do most of the quote-unquote “women’s work,” the support work that is actually what is the daily grind of these groups.

Brian Balogh: Sometimes Glenna receives pushback about the nature of her work, that taking photographs of white supremacists amplifies their message. Glenna says she takes this concern seriously, but that we ignore white supremacy at our peril.

Glenna Gordon: All of these groups already are out there. I think that part of why we got to where we are is because so many people are like, “Just ignore them and they’ll go away. Don’t give them air. If you give them air, then they just spread their messages.” And I disagree with that. They’ve spread their messages while we were ignoring them. While all these coastal elites are busy celebrating the progress of our first black president, these groups were thriving, and that was because we ignored them.

Brian Balogh: Glenna says one way we’ve ignored white supremacists is by not seeing them, which is why photography is so important.

Glenna Gordon: I think the best photos, when I’m trying to take a good photo, I’m trying to take a photo that has a complicated set of layered meanings and that somebody will look at and sort of stop and say, “Oh.” And you know, the photo of Erica, she’s beautiful, but it’s also kind of a creepy photo. Actually, I only hope it’s creepy. I think it’s a little creepy. There’s very dramatic lighting, and you see her tattoo on her chest that says, “I will never be silenced.” And I think we have to look at these things, and I think that they have an ability to punch us in the gut in a way that’s really different than another 1,200-word opinion piece in The New York Times that gets some clicks, not too many.

Glenna Gordon: If we need to change the way America talks about race and thinks about white supremacy, we have to look at woman, and we have to look at how these ideas are spread. And if you only look at acts of violence, if you only look at acts of vandalism, then you’re only looking at the tip of the iceberg, and you will always only be responding afterwards, when there is an act of violence or where is an act of vandalism or there is a rally or anything like that. You’re responding after. If you are looking at the entire iceberg, if you are looking at how white supremacy operates as a system, you have to look at who are the people keeping it afloat. Because women always do as much if not more work than men in most arenas most of the time, that is also true for white supremacy. Women are what keep these groups alive.

Madame Slave Owner

The standard image of a slave owner in antebellum America is almost never wearing a hoop skirt. But Stephanie Jones-Rogers, an associate professor of history at UC Berkeley, says white women owned enslaved people and played a critical role in propping up slavery. And in the decades after the Civil War, they worked hard to change the narrative about their role in slavery and white supremacy.

Music:
Sensitive by Podington Bear

slaveholders; slavery; white supremacy; women’s history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan Connolly: Often seen as a movement circulating at the fringes of American society, white supremacy has been in the news recently.

Brian Balogh: Last month a House Oversight Joint Subcommittee held hearings on white supremacy, and the Department of Homeland Security announced it will now recognize white nationalism as a major threat to the United States.

Joanne Freeman: But the discussion of white supremacy in America rarely includes women. Despite that fact, they play an important, if overlooked, role in the movement.

Nathan Connolly: So today on BackStory, we’re digging into the little-known history behind the topic of women in white supremacy. You’ll find out why the issue has been overlooked by historians.

Brian Balogh: And you’ll learn about how white women use public education to further white supremacy, from the Jim Crow era and beyond.

Nathan Connolly: When you open up a history book to read about the period before the Civil War, there’s a good chance you’ll find slavery depicted as an institution powered by white men. This is a story Stephanie Jones-Rogers wants to change. She says historians have overlooked the role white female slave owners played in propping up slavery and promoting white supremacist values. The problem was coverture, the legal system that stripped women’s right to hold property. Many people have assumed coverture was absolute. In other words, they believe a white woman might inherit enslaved people from her father, but when she was married, her property became her husband’s. Turns out, though, coverture wasn’t absolute, and many white women found ways to circumvent the laws.

Nathan Connolly: To learn more, I caught up with Stephanie Jones-Rogers. She’s the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. I started by asking her how she came to the topic by using a well-known but underutilized source, narratives taken by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, also known as the WPA Narratives.

Stephanie J-R: You know, when I started this project about 10 years ago as a graduate student, I was reading the scholarship produced around the African American experience, particularly in slavery, and also examining the scholarship around white women’s experiences in the South, and noticed that there was a disconnect around the question of whether white women were deeply and profoundly invested in the economy of American slavery, whether they bought and sold slaves and hired them, et cetera. I think the disconnect really revolved around the different types of sources that were being used.

Stephanie J-R: In the scholarship around the African American experience, many scholars were in fact looking at those interviews with formerly enslaved people, but they weren’t looking at them to answer the question, what did formerly enslaved people have to say about white women’s economic investments in their continued enslavement and captivity? And so by looking at those interviews and asking that different question of those sources, I was able to find out that formerly enslaved people talked about this all the time, and they answered this question in a variety of ways all the time.

Nathan Connolly: And that focus on economics, it really does allow you to explode a lot of kind of two-dimensional renderings of the plantation myth and who is the wicked slavemaster versus the kind of sympathetic mistress and these beleaguered African Americans who are just kind of milling around on the plantation looking for a kind eye from the mistress to alleviate these conditions. You’re describing white women slavemasters who are in some cases even more brutal than their white male counterparts, and again, driven by this economic imperative. What’s going on there?

Stephanie J-R: One of the things that became really clear to me as I looked at what formerly enslaved people had to say about white women’s economic investments in the institution is that these investments began when these women were actually young girls, sometimes even infants. What they show, what they talk about, is the fact that young girls were inheriting enslaved people as gifts, so they were given enslaved people as gifts when they were just infants, as Christmas gifts, as wedding presents, as birthday gifts. So they were showing how over the course of these young women’s lives, these white women’s lives, they were receiving enslaved people as property.

Stephanie J-R: If you start the story there, if you start the story in girlhood and in infancy, you realize that white women had every reason to hold tight to, and to invest in, the institution. And what that meant is that they were willing to enact violence and to perpetrate acts of violence and brutality to keep them submissive and to bend to their will.

Nathan Connolly: To the extent that you feel comfortable with the details, can you give us an example of the kinds of violence that you would see meted out at white women’s hands?

Stephanie J-R: One particularly powerful example that I talk about in the book is a young enslaved girl who had a mistress who essentially kept the enslaved people that worked in the household and that she owned in near starvation. This white woman decided one day to leave a piece of candy on a piece of furniture, and this young enslaved girl was tasked with cleaning that particular room. One day she gave into her temptation, she ate the piece of candy, and her mistress decided to punish her for that. She put the young enslaved girl’s head under the rocker of her rocking chair, and then she called upon her white daughter to inflict a whipping on the young enslaved girl.

Stephanie J-R: So as her daughter was whipping the young enslaved girl, she was rocking back and forth on the enslaved girl’s head. And she caused such physical damage that this young girl was never able to eat solid foods again. Until her elder years, she was deformed and disfigured in her face. So this is the kind of brutal violence that was enacted in these households, not by white men but by white women, as well as young white girls.

Nathan Connolly: I’m thinking about a book, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. There, Kathleen Brown describes a kind of anxiety of control that white men had over the entire plantation household. There was control over their wives, but also control over the slaves themselves, enslaved people. And I’m just curious about this question of anxiety. What are the kinds of concerns, in addition to the economic concerns, that might be driving the kinds of brutality that you’re describing in this work?

Stephanie J-R: Well, I think in large part white women had the same kind of anxieties around the control that they hoped that they had. These are women who are charging enslaved people with the most intimate forms of labor that we could possibly imagine. They charged enslaved mothers with wet nursing, breastfeeding their infants, their newborns and their infants. And when you think about the kind of intimacy, the level of intimacy that’s involved in that kind of labor, the fact that they are really putting the lives of their infants in the hands of women who they may come to own eventually, you also realize that these enslaved people had the power of life and death over the future of the white race in some cases.

Stephanie J-R: So I think what you see is that some of these white women are in fact kind of grappling with the contradictions, the paradoxes that were embedded in the institution of slavery, wherein you assume that these people are willingly doing this work, but they also know deep down that these individuals are only able to perform in this way, are performing in this way, because of the persistent threat of violence. And so I think these white women are also cognizant of the fact that at any moment these individuals could in fact take the lives of their children, as well as their own lives, cooking their food, et cetera.

Nathan Connolly: And intimacy and anxiety, I imagine, is deeply connected with the idea of marriage too. Many of these white women who, because of American laws of coverture, are coupling, but then concerned about their property basically being taken over by white male husbands. So again, there was a loss of a certain amount of autonomy that comes through an intimate relationship. I’m very curious about how marriage, again, impacted the way that many of these white women owned slaves, treated slaves, dealt with the passage of slaves from one generation to the next. I mean, was there a sense that white women’s status as owners would be compromised through the marriage contract?

Stephanie J-R: If you give a white woman or a white girl an enslaved person as a child, and they grow up with this person not simply as a playmate, thinking of them as a playmate, but also understanding that they are property too, once they become of marriageable age, they’re not willing to relinquish the profound and deep investments that they have in the ownership of that person. Before they even get married, they are thinking of ways to circumvent the laws of coverture. They are thinking of how to protect the property that they bring into marriage, and they do that by figuring out the loopholes, figuring out the ways in which the law allows them to do that.

Stephanie J-R: One of the ways that the law allows them to do that is through what are called marriage contracts or marital contracts or what we would today call prenuptial agreements.

Nathan Connolly: That’s what it sounded like, yeah.

Stephanie J-R: Yeah, so they enter into these prenuptial agreements where they sketch out what property they’re bringing into the marriage, what levels of control they hope to continue to have over that property, what control they will have over any property they may inherit in the future, that they may purchase in the future, all of the kind of legal constraints that they would confront. Through coverture, they’re able to kind of sketch out these loopholes, workarounds. So they work around the laws of coverture by protecting their slaves, by putting them in separate estates as well, so what we would consider to be a trust fund today. They work with parents in some cases to devise or to construct trust funds.

Stephanie J-R: And so through those two really important legal instruments, they’re able to do what formerly enslaved people said they did, which is to control in almost absolute fashion the enslaved people that they bring into their marriages, that they purchase after marriage, and that they may inherit during their marriages as well.

Nathan Connolly: Again, this just flies in the face of so many dominant narratives coming out of this period. I mean, many white women themselves who are of a particular class and, again, who are literate, they’re trying to fashion themselves in 19th century writings as being the quote-unquote “delicate sex” or that they’re somehow more virtuous or benevolent. How do you think any of this serves to conceal the brutality that is happening under white women’s ownership in the 19th century South?

Stephanie J-R: I am certainly not a literary scholar, but I do read what literary scholars have to say about the act of writing a diary, what’s going on behind the scene when diarists choose to write the things they do. And these are calculated writings. These are writings that the diarists are writing with an audience in mind sometimes.

Stephanie J-R: What I talk about at the end of the book is the ways in which after slavery is over, former slave-owning women and the descendants of former slave-owning women take up the pen to in fact do exactly what you say, to craft a narrative of slavery in which white women play simply benevolent roles, that they are divine creatures who are essentially, they’re born to slavery, so they are not actively engaged in the perpetuation of the institution. They are born to it, so they have no choice but to live in a culture, an environment in which slavery is fundamental. But they also whitewash and sanitize the roles that they play in the economy of American slavery, in the brutality of slavery and the terror of slavery.

Nathan Connolly: I’m just curious about how you would describe the impact or the legacy of white women’s storytelling around slavery in allowing white supremacy to remain a constant feature of what southern, and really American, life has to abide by in the late 19th and early 20th century?

Stephanie J-R: Karen Cox’s work, the wonderful work on the United Daughters of the Confederacy, shows that the construction of these narratives, of these very sanitized narratives, they’re all kind of connected, that we think of history as something that’s written by male victors, but in this case history is written by female victors as well. And what I mean by victors is that, while white southerners who were loyal to the Confederacy, that embraced secession, may have in fact lost the war, but they certainly did not lose the ideological war.

Stephanie J-R: Very important dimensions of the story of slavery have in large part been crafted at the end of their pens. When you erase many of the important roles that white women played in the economic dimensions of the institution, in the construction of a racially divided social order, the afterlife is that any time we see white women participating in these horrid acts of racial terror or racial violence, we scratch our heads and we’re shocked. And I think it’s in large part because of that very conscious act of narration, very conscious act of constructing a very sanitized narrative of slavery in which white women don’t play brutal, violent parts.

Nathan Connolly: Now, this is a way, I have to imagine, of not just concealing the ideological commitment that white women might have to white supremacy, but also about this property question. Just going right back and saying that there’s a form of wealth that’s created in human flesh that white women simply don’t want to be associated with. So how much of it do you think, not to quantify it, but to what degree would you suspect that a lot of this mythmaking is about concealing the ways in which white women are generating wealth out of slavery?

Stephanie J-R: Well, I should also say, one of the things that other historians have shown for the colonial period, which I’m finding to be true in the 19th century, is that white slave-owning parents typically gave their daughters more slaves than they did land. They did so with this idea that when a young couple married, that the daughter would bring the slaves and the son would bring the land, and they would have everything they needed to start. This is considered kind of a nest egg situation, or this is to get them started on these new lives that they were beginning.

Stephanie J-R: And when you think about the fact that white women are receiving upon marriage far more slaves than they are any other form of property, what that also suggests is that they have a deeper investment in the institution of slavery, and that investment is profoundly economic in large part because most if not all of their wealth is bound up in the bodies of enslaved people. We really do have a concept of wealth as heavily gendered, a gendered concept of wealth in which men possess wealth, women benefit from men’s wealth. And here what I show, and then what I’m going to show in the second project, is that women are bringing a substantial amount of wealth into their marriages, so much so that some husbands have nothing, and women are the ones who come in with the wealth. Women are the ones that are financing their husband’s speculative pursuits in cotton, for example, or in businesses or in the railroad.

Nathan Connolly: As a final point, I’m curious about what your research taught you about feminism in the late 19th century, if we feel comfortable even describing what’s happening in the plantation context as being part of this genealogy around feminism. Because you have, obviously, black women who are recounting their experiences being enslaved. We have white women who are imagining a vision of gender equality that is hinged to the property relationship. And after all of this gets undone by emancipation, there’s a need to still fight for women’s rights, however folks chose to define that. And so I’m just curious about this world torn apart. Is there anything that you see as new in our learning about feminism and how feminism gets fashioned out of the slave moment?

Stephanie J-R: Another reason why the story that I tell in this book hasn’t really factored into what we know about slavery and particularly white southern women’s investments in it is in large part because of the fact that the field of women’s history emerges during the same moment that the feminist movement of the 20th century is taking shape, is becoming a powerful force in our country. And so ultimately, the narratives that emerge out of that moment are triumphant narratives, are narratives of women being empowered in ways that empower those around them, that forge alliances and create alliances. This is a feminist story, but it’s not that feminist story. This is what I call a very ugly feminist story, and what it shows is that for these women, slavery was their freedom. Their freedom as women was really contingent upon their decision to embrace whiteness and white supremacy in a time when they were experiencing gender oppression.

Stephanie J-R: I think it serves as a lesson for us in the present, as we look at certain, for example, voting patterns among some white women in the country and we scratch our heads. What it shows is that there are moments in which white women have chosen to embrace white privilege and white supremacy, in spite of fighting against, struggling with gender oppression. Whiteness offers them privileges and benefits that their gender certainly does not.

Nathan Connolly: Stephanie Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She’s also the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.

‘Segregation’s Constant Gardeners’

When we think about the people promoting white supremacy in the 20th century, we often think about men in political power reinforcing Jim Crow or opposing the civil rights movement. But while men may have written the rules for upholding racial segregation, white women molded those rules into a reality. Joanne talks with Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, associate professor of history at Western Carolina University, about how white women were behind a lot of pushback to racial equality in the mid 20th century.

Music:
Little Dipper by Podington Bear

jim crow; racism; segregation; white supremacy; white women

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne Freeman: Today we can get a glimpse into the current world of white supremacy through the lens of Glenna Gordon’s striking photography. And as we just heard, white women helped maintain slavery as an institution. But what about the role of white women in between those two eras? As the United States moved from Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement, what were white women doing, and how did they respond to changes in society?

Elizabeth McRae: They’re sort of like the church ladies of white supremacist politics, the people that are doing all the groundwork. Maybe not the sort of public speaking or being lifted up as the spokesmen, but doing the work that makes that possible.

Joanne Freeman: Historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae has researched how white women were behind a lot of the pushback against racial equality from the 1920s to the 1970s. She says when we think about people promoting white supremacy, we often focus on the role of men in political power, but while men may have written the rules for upholding racial segregation, white women molded those rules into a reality.

Elizabeth McRae: I didn’t start out really looking for white women. I started out looking for how racial segregation was upheld and reproduced and shaped and reshaped in the American South. What I found everywhere I looked was women working on this grassroots level, being the sort of grassroots workers for social welfare policy, as teachers reporting to their superintendents or principals that they thought there was a black child who was passing in their classrooms, or working to shape the history that was told in public school textbooks.

Joanne Freeman: A lot of women’s work defending segregation orbited around the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, but McRae says pushback against school integration is only one piece of white supremacy’s puzzle during this time period. Another big piece can be found when women achieved the right to vote in 1920.

Elizabeth McRae: When women were talking and pushing for the right to vote, in the South, some suffragists kept assuring the broader public, and particularly the male elected officials, that their votes would uphold racial segregation, not destabilize it. But it could be strategy, right? At first, I was like, oh wow, is this just a strategy, and they’re going to give up on this once they get the right to vote? And I think it’s probably both. For some it was a strategy, that the outcome was worth sacrificing principled political rhetoric on the front end, but with that sort of promise that they would uphold racial segregation, I began to look at how they did it. I think we imagine that the quest for more rights, and the people pushing for equal voting rights, imagine a landscape of equal voting rights for all, but many did not.

Joanne Freeman: Now, one of the ways in which these grassroots white women were enforcing white supremacy is through policing social welfare institutions, and you talk about the Racial Integrity Act, which was implemented in Virginia in the 1920s. Tell us a little bit more about the Racial Integrity Act and how that is an example of these white women bolstering white supremacy.

Elizabeth McRae: The legislation, which was passed in 1924, comes out of both a national and kind of a pretty state-level effort. The folks pushing the Racial Integrity Act believe in eugenics. They believe in this sort of false race science. They’re also fearful that more and more with the hardening of racial segregation, that more and more people are passing from black to white or from Indian to white. They’re particularly interested in shoring up and hardening the line between black and white.

Elizabeth McRae: So in Virginia, in order for it to work, people on the ground have to report on their neighbors and friends and school children, and alert people to passing. The work, in order to enforce the Racial Integrity Act, it falls on midwives, who deliver most of the babies at this time, on school teachers, on registrars who were doing marriage and birth certificates. And so it is really women that become the vanguard of the Racial Integrity Act. It’s nurses writing to the state, saying, “Oh, I think we admitted this person to the hospital that is black but not white.” The law would have sat there without these local enforcers, and these local enforcers were women. They were women really familiar with the communities. I mean, they had sort of local authority as teachers and as social welfare workers.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. So these white women doing really the legwork and being the eyes and the ears. I mean, it’s a reminder that passing a law is one thing, implementation is another, and your work is pointing out how these white women are really at the root of that.

Elizabeth McRae: Right. And they weren’t screaming racist epithets. Their work was quiet and sustained, and in their mind they were following the law. I don’t know whether they were committed to white supremacy or not, but it doesn’t matter, because their work shored up the system. For a long time, even in the 1980s, people were having babies in hospitals in Lynchburg, and the hospital officials would look at their last name and declare their racial identity, even if the mother disputed it.

Joanne Freeman: Now, another way that these white southern women are really enforcing white supremacy is through education. So how are these women using public education as a kind of platform for white supremacy?

Elizabeth McRae: It’s a place that women, even before the vote, had carried some sort of public authority. Schools were thought to be kind of an extension of the home. Maybe not in policy but in practice, public education was dominated at the ground level by women. In the interwar period, so between 1920 and World War II, white women had really won the battle, in terms of what was in the nation’s textbooks. I mean, it was a very white South-friendly narrative, a narrative of reconciliation around imperialism, a narrative that said Reconstruction was corrupt, and it was corrupted by African Americans and greedy Yankees who came down to the South. I mean, that was the story told, so the national narrative was kind of dominated by this white Confederate narrative.

Elizabeth McRae: But these female producers of white supremacist thought kept telling white women that they had to work to make sure that their schools pepped up those stories, and it was particularly important as former Confederates and people who had memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow died out, that women needed to be really vigilant about what was being taught in their schools.

Joanne Freeman: Tell us about an essay contest that students were encouraged to write.

Elizabeth McRae: Well, in the interwar period, they were often about celebrating the Confederacy, so why was the Confederacy right to secede? But after World War II, as the Allies, in shoring up racial segregation, begin to defect the Democratic Party, and the Supreme Court, and the United Nations is offering a multicultural education curriculum, segregationist women begin to retool these essay contests. The white citizens’ councils, for example, in Mississippi will have essay contests even as late as 1959 and 1960 about why segregation is best for both races. And the prize for one girl and one boy from Mississippi is $500, which at that point would have paid for four years of a college education at the University of Mississippi. So we’re not talking about chump change for an essay. It’s not like $25, it’s $500, and thousands of students wrote these essays.

Elizabeth McRae: They’re 16 in 1959. They’re still around. That was their education, but that’s a way that even after the Brown decision that folks continued to cultivate a curriculum in a segregationist education, so that when the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed, you had a new group, a young group of white southerners and white Americans who had been trained and taught this narrative that was really counter to the Civil Rights Movement.

Joanne Freeman: Now, it strikes me, some of what you’re talking about in all of these different ways in which these white southern women are having power to influence things is partly the morality of motherhood power. Is that part of what they’re banking on here?

Elizabeth McRae: It is part, and I think the female political strategists of segregation try all sorts of different languages. They employ motherhood, like if you’re going to be a good mother, you need to uphold racial segregation. They experiment with languages of citizenship. They’ll try out color blind rhetoric. But motherhood is really central in the way, if we follow how they craft ideas of motherhood, it bleeds over later into a language of family values, that they can draw the line between what it means to be a good white mother.

Elizabeth McRae: And so being a good white mother meant, in many ways, that you taught the lessons of racial segregation, and that the larger society could recognize what a good mother you were by the racial distance that your children kept. But the language of motherhood meant that you could cross class lines. If racial distance was the mark of being a good white mother, then poor white women in the architecture of segregation could uphold that.

Elizabeth McRae: So the women of New Orleans, like in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, which was a working class white neighborhood in the 1950s and ’60s, they could be good white mothers, because they could ensure that their kids went to segregated schools, in a way that economically in an integrated world they would not be able to move to the suburbs and make sure that their kids went to virtually all-white schools. But in a system of legalized segregation, they could be good white mothers.

Joanne Freeman: Now, I’m going to make a comparison that’s going to sound wacky, but in the late 18th century, when people were talking about the French Revolution, some people were very worried about women, because they said that women could sneak into places and crawl between the lines and do things that men couldn’t do, precisely because they weren’t sort of full-fledged citizens. And it sounds kind of like that’s part of what you’re describing here, is that it’s their somewhat compromised status that actually gives them a kind of power.

Elizabeth McRae: Yes. White women have this precarious position in a system of white supremacy, because their bodies are particularly important. By crossing the racial line in terms of marriage and sex, they can destroy the color line. And so it’s really important that white women are policed too, and a lot of the work the most active female segregationists do is about policing white women too, to making sure that they don’t do that.

Elizabeth McRae: But I think you’re right in the way that the core women that I write about believe that they’re more powerful, because they’re not seeking the rewards of the party. So they can be ideologically pure, because they’re not going to lose a committee assignment. They early on begin to talk about how Democratic men, big D Democratic men, in the South are going to follow the party, because they can’t adhere to their principles in the way white women can. And so it is up to white women. If they break from Roosevelt’s politics, they’re not going to be punished, because they don’t have these committee assignments or positions in the party. It is their compromised position that allows them to think that they are the true believers and the gatekeepers for racial segregation.

Joanne Freeman: I’m curious to hear how you think that, I guess the politics, but more important than that, the rhetoric of these white women segregationists has evolved into the early 21st century. Are there places where you really see echoes of this kind of activism in today’s culture?

Elizabeth McRae: I’m going to back up just a second. If you were a real committed segregationist and advocate for white supremacist politic as a woman, you find yourself moving out of the Democratic Party into the Republican Party, and then into the far right. The most committed, that’s sort of their trajectory. And in the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Nixon pushes Congress to reconsider the Genocide Convention, which was a UN convention that came out of World War II, condemning genocide. The US had never ratified that, and in part they hadn’t ratified it because of the work of white women. And in the late 1960s and ’70s, see women and men of the far right writing their senators, saying, “Do not ratify the Genocide Convention.” And their reason is, they believe it would limit the power of the police, and that the police would be prosecuted for genocide for their treatment of the Black Panther Party.

Elizabeth McRae: In some ways, I see this sort of segregationist rhetoric, and the far right version of that, as feeding the conversation we have today about police brutality and Black Lives Matter. And so I think the other continuation is that after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And I think the way the public discussion is about white supremacist politics today, I think we’re continuing to ignore the work, what women do on the grassroots level.

Joanne Freeman: Elizabeth Gillespie McRae is an Associate Professor of History at Western Carolina University. She’s also the author of the book Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy.

Brian Balogh: Hey, Nathan, Joanne, those are some terrific interviews, and I came away with one question, which is, if women are such a crucial part of this story, how come in the history of things we’re only beginning to just talk about them now?

Joanne Freeman: Well, I think part of the answer to that question is tied up with what I felt was a big irony about all of the content of these interviews, which is that for so long, historians, and I think just generally people, have dismissed women’s work as being unimportant or secondary or sort of just working in the background to keep things going. And part of that has been dismissing all of the work and all of the effort and all of the impact that all of the interviews in this show are really showing today.

Nathan Connolly: Right, right. I would agree. If you think about the cycle of how groups get incorporated into national conversations about history, I think it was really necessary and important in the late ’60s and early ’70s to think about how feminism and women’s presence in the history really gets integrated into the big stories that we tell. And you have to obviously think about suffrage, and you think about the Women’s Rights Movement. But then to Joanne’s point, if you take the capacious definition of “work,” that also means working sometimes at history’s underside. I think there is a very important progression that we’re seeing, where the full completeness of women’s roles on a variety of different good versus evil axes, I think is now finally getting rounded out all the way.

Brian Balogh: So do we run a risk here of forgetting that even these female plantation owners, even women creating myths about Confederate society and how wonderful slavery was, that they too were oppressed at the very time that they were oppressing?

Nathan Connolly: I think we can very safely talk about how women’s activities were circumscribed by patriarchy, even as they are engaging in white supremacist work. You look at the United Daughters of the Confederacy, for example, and they are engaged in basically helping to advance a very particular vision of the Lost Cause and of the happy plantation, but we relegate it to the domestic sphere. I mean, you’re talking about an organization that had some 45,000 members shortly after the turn of the century, and what they’re basically doing with that woman power, in large measure, is engaging in very clear moments of memory or refashioning the plantation memory, building a mammy, or proposing to anyway, mammy monument on the Washington Mall. That was one of their big projects.

Nathan Connolly: And that is still a very small way of contributing to what was the larger workings of southern society at that time. In other words, they were circumscribed to the parlors and in ways that were going to make sure that white men were still the dominant representatives of the political power of the former Confederacy.

Brian Balogh: I’m going to pivot to the post-World War II period, because growing up in Coral Gables, Florida in the 1960s, I was taught in my civics class about the War of Northern Aggression.

Nathan Connolly: Seriously?

Brian Balogh: Seriously.

Joanne Freeman: Really?

Brian Balogh: Yep.

Nathan Connolly: In Miami, wow.

Brian Balogh: In Miami.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Brian Balogh: And I was taught by, I won’t mention his name, but a male teacher. What I never realized until I listened to earlier parts of this show was that it was probably women who inserted that in our textbooks. I never really thought about how crucial women were to maintaining that Lost Cause, War of Northern Aggression whole take on the Civil War. That strikes as pretty important.

Joanne Freeman: And that’s, political power is one kind of power. Cultural power is another kind of power, and it’s a power that can be wielded, I think, more easily and seemingly more safely by people who lack a certain degree of political power.

Brian Balogh: Exactly. Those nurses, those recording clerks, those social workers who were literally implementing the white supremacist thoughts reflected in legislation. To me, as somebody who studies bureaucracy, that’s a pretty potent form of power and a pretty enduring one.

Nathan Connolly: One of the things that I like about exploring this question about white women inside the workings of white supremacy is very similar to what I find to be fruitful about talking through exploitation being done by African American business people, or landlords in particular, in some of the stuff I’ve written about in the past. Which is to say, that the mere presence of a black business person does not remove the possibility that a tenant can be exploited or an employee can be taken advantage of.

Nathan Connolly: And the mere presence of a woman worker within an organization, or even an organization run by women, the mere fact of that women’s presence or labor does not necessarily mean that it’s a place of progressive politics. And I think we fall oftentimes into the trap of simply thinking that the presence of women or people of color within an organization or within an institution therefore means that that institution will behave in the interest of those people.

Nathan Connolly: So to me, feel very heartened that it raises, at least, for us a way of asking questions slightly differently, which is to say, what’s the aim of the organizations and how can we look at the subjects or the targets of those different collective bodies as being the more important place to examine whether or not that is a useful political movement or institution or what have you?

Joanne Freeman: I don’t know what to do with this, but I’m going to say it anyway and just sort of see where it goes. Listening to the interviews and thinking about the topic of this show, speaking as a white woman, some part of me feels guilt. I suppose you could say some of that’s attached to privilege, but it isn’t just attached to privilege. It’s looking at these people and knowing that I am one of these people, and feeling some degree of shame. And not quite knowing what to do with that feeling and not quite feeling that it’s entirely logical, but it’s a very strong feeling.

Nathan Connolly: Right. I would say that you are not one of these people, and I would say-

Joanne Freeman: Thank you, Nathan.

Nathan Connolly: And I would say it in the same way that I would not feel comfortable if somebody drew a parallel between me and Booker T. Washington kind of figure. Which is to say, that the context that we’re living in is different, that the way that we are concerned about these questions are decidedly different than our historical predecessors, and that there might in fact be different ways that we can identify with past historical subjects than our racial identity. For the same reason that you can kind of dress up as who you want to on Halloween, we can really claim that our historical forbears are broader than merely the people who we might check one box alongside. I think there are a lot of different ways in which our political affinities and subject positions can be. I don’t think the mere fact of race should be that which limits us to how we think about our legacy, traditions, and heritage.

Joanne Freeman: I think that’s true. And I also think, now that we’re talking about this and I’ve put this out into the air, I think part of what I’m feeling is precisely where we began our discussion, which is something is being exposed and revealed as being powerful and not admirable, and it’s something that everyone, including me, has not necessarily reckoned with before. And so as a white woman, I suppose some of what I’m feeling is just recognition of a past that maybe I hadn’t fully recognized before.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore. BackStory is produced out of Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh idea in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Announcer: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.