Virtual Event: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy: A Panel Discussion on Mothers of Massive Resistance

Why do white supremacist politics in America remain so powerful? Elizabeth Gillespie McRae argues that the answer lies with white women. Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow.

Join the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality for a panel discussion of "Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy" featuring:

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae (Associate Professor of History, Western Carolina University), author;

Kathleen Belew (Assistant Professor of History, University of Chicago and author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America), discussant; and

LaToya Jefferson-James (Assistant Professor of Literature, Mississippi Valley State University), discussant.

Registration through the Zoom link is required.

About the Book
Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Without these mundane, everyday acts, white supremacist politics could not have shaped local, regional, and national politics the way it did or lasted as long as it has.

With white women at the center of the story, postwar racist practices look very different than the male-dominated narratives of the resistance to Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Women like Nell Battle Lewis, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker publicized threats to their Jim Crow world through political organizing, private correspondence, and journalism. Their anti-Black efforts began before World War II and the Brown decision and persisted past the 1964 Civil Rights Act and anti-busing protests. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with and shaping the rise of the New Right. Mothers of Massive Resistance reveals the diverse ways white women sustained white supremacist politics and thought well beyond the federal legislation that overturned legal segregation.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.