Racist female power: a historian reports how viciously white American women from the southern states fought viciously in the 1950s and 1960s against the admission of black students to schools previously reserved for whites. The importance of women has so far been neglected when looking at the history of racism, says the scientist.
The recent unrest and the current Black Lives Matter movement have again brought racism into focus in the USA. It is becoming clear that the minds of many white citizens still hold the notion that not all people are equal. This is reflected today in terms such as “White Supremacy”. This denotes ideologies that give people of European descent a higher value than other “races” and thus justify a privileged position.
What underlies racism in the USA seems clear: The inhuman system of slavery still casts its long shadow over society. After the defeat of the southern states in the American Civil War, the era of slavery ended in 1865, but as a result African Americans were not treated as citizens of equal value. There was a strict division of public space in the southern states: there were separate park benches, cemeteries, blood banks, transport and schools for whites and blacks. In 1896 this separation was legitimized again on the condition that all institutions should be equivalent. “But they never were,” says Rebecca Brückmann from the Ruhr University Bochum. “Activists then fought against the injustices more or less unsuccessfully for 50 years,” says the historian. That changed only after World War II, when the first fighters for equality in the United States went to court. In 1954 a momentous verdict was passed: Racial segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional.
Rabid protests
But the admission of black pupils to schools that were previously only reserved for whites met with resistance, in some cases violent. The protest of the white population against the so-called desegregation escalated to such an extent that even the military had to intervene. Brückmann has dealt with these developments in detail. As she explains, when it comes to racism, men are often in the foreground. Her focus was therefore on the activities of women during the unrest after the abolition of racial segregation. “The subject of school – the concern of the children, involved the mothers particularly intensely,” emphasizes the historian in this context. In order to analyze their behavior, she evaluated newspaper articles, memoirs, records from school administrators and interrogation protocols from the FBI. She has summarized her results in a book that will be published in early 2021.
As a striking example of the racist activities of women, she highlights the events in Little Rock. In the capital of the US state Arkansas, all four high schools had to be closed for one year in 1958 and 1959. The reason: the parents of around 2000 students rebelled against the schooling of nine black children. As Brückmann reports, the information from the time shows how many mothers apparently specifically encouraged their children to bully their black classmates. The protests then culminated in the school closure on the grounds that it would be better not to have a school than to teach black people together.
In another case, women made themselves particularly vicious in New Orleans in 1960, reports Brückmann. Here the “female popular anger” was directed at four black children who had been admitted to two elementary schools. The information about the events shows that the women even physically attacked the children’s parents and threatened the children with death. Among the perpetrators were also educated people and members of the upper class, emphasizes Brückmann.
Not just “cheerleaders”
Apparently, however, these women were only viewed as vocal supporters of the main male actors: the police described the women’s group as “cheerleaders”. “This shows the very masculist discourse about the desegregation crises in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the fact that it was long assumed that women were only symbols and not actors of their own,” says Brückmann. “In fact, they were on the field because these women were actors on the ground themselves and organized demonstrations, lobbyed and attacked white parents who did not want to participate in the boycott.”
The basis of the radicalism was a deep-seated racism. “But it’s always more complex than it looks,” says Brückmann. According to the historian, there was also a general feeling of loss of control mingled with the story. People wanted the US government to stay out of the concerns of individual states. The concept of superior white identity helped – it could unite and consolidate different currents. And White Supremacy still fulfills this function today, says Brückmann.
As for the outcome of the tumult in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the historian, it became clear that after the mothers’ protests against the admission of black schoolchildren failed to have the desired effect, some demographic restructuring occurred: the whites increasingly moved into the Suburbs and thus in school districts that still corresponded to their ideas.
Source: Rubin – Ruhr University Bochum, Original publication: Rebecca Brückmann: Massive Resistance and southern womanhood. White women, class, and segregation. University of Georgia Press, Athens 2021, 284 pages, ISBN: 9780820358352