In Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae makes a strong argument for white women’s vital role in protecting and perpetuating white supremacy and thwarting integration in the US. One hundred years ago, woman began to organize in ways that we would recognize from today’s resistance movements. They developed grassroots campaigns reaching out to other women and encouraging them to organize, to write letters, to publish, to speak up and to vote. They did this, however, […]
Two books so close as to be indistinguishable
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]
Vignettes of inequity
One of the difficulties of studying history lies in the inherent tendency of people to not see themselves as playing a small role in a larger story. We are all the center of our own universe, after all, so it’s hard to remember that everything isn’t actually revolving around our own brilliance. Our actions are our own, but they make up a part of the larger trajectory of human progress. In studying history, the goal is to compose these fine details into a larger picture […]
That time a Sheriff tried to lynch Thurgood Marshall
In 1949, a 17-year old white woman didn’t come home one night. The next day, she and her husband said she had been raped by four black men. Two of the men had helped the couple when they were stranded in their car. Two more were nowhere near the scene of the alleged crime-one was being arrested miles away. But that didn’t matter. The accusation of black hands sullying white maidenhood was enough to whip white Southerners in a frenzy. Only three of the accused […]