‘Segregation’s Constant Gardeners’

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.