Reviews in American History

Iconography in history can be a dangerous thing. It encourages the deification of men such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X as lone freedom fighters in the long civil rights movement. It codes Pan-African strategists as male and reduces the long and wide geographical arc of white supremacy to the actions of a few men such as George Wallace and Ross Barnett. The danger with historical iconography is that it leads to inaccurate and reductionist accounts of history. It often marginalizes women's leadership or excludes them altogether.

Three recently published monographs about black and white women's everyday political mobilization, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom; Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy; and Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, push back against historical narratives that center exclusively on men. These works show that from civil rights struggles and massive resistance in the United States to global black nationalist movements, women have played pivotal roles. Together, the books complicate our understanding of gender and the ways in which women have attempted to make sense of the world they live in and transform. The works also challenge male-dominated narratives about civil rights activism, black emigration, and American conservatism. While these books are not the first [End Page 629] to put female actors at center stage, they expand our knowledge of women's political work in various arenas.

In Strategic Sisterhood, Rebecca Tuuri introduced readers to the longstanding political and social justice work of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an elite black women's organization formed by Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. The esteemed black woman educator and activist sought to unite black women's sororities, professional organizations, and auxiliaries to improve black women and their communities. Under Bethune's tenure from 1935 until 1949, the council focused on obtaining federal government jobs and military opportunities for black women but failed to shed its elitist image. In addition to Bethune, other powerful black women who held NCNW leadership positions include Sadie Alexander, the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics in the United States, and Patricia Harris, the first African American woman to serve in a United States presidential cabinet and to serve as a United States ambassador. While NCNW membership has consisted mainly of middle-class black women, the council supported both moderate and radical black activism throughout the twentieth century, partnering both with interracial groups and groups committed to black separatism.

While it is now expected that scholarship on the civil rights movement include the contributions of women, studies that focus on women's civil rights organizations remain rare. Historian Tiyi Morris's Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (2015) is one notable exception. Tuuri's scholarship on the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, helps to fill the void and complicates traditional understandings of radical political organizing.

Dorothy Height assumed the NCNW presidency in 1956 and used the position to ensure that black women's voices and perspectives were included in civil rights leadership gatherings throughout the 1960s. When March on Washington organizers denied women a major speaking role at the historic event in 1963, Height, under the auspices of the NCNW, organized a women's conference the very next day. She convened the meeting even though male organizers of the march had requested that no organizations hold separate meetings after the march. In that instance and in countless others, the council used its membership and resources to fight white supremacy and sexism.

Dispelling the notion of a monolithic civil rights movement, Tuuri demonstrates that unlike organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) that engaged in nonviolent direct action, the NCNW relied on a strategy of moral suasion and respectable "ladylike" behavior to combat racism. This approach garnered the council large donations from prominent politicians, businessmen, and private foundations, all of which welcomed a more moderate approach to civil [End Page 630] rights. The council's first major national civil rights project was Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). WIMS was an experiment during the 1964 Freedom Summer that brought teams of northern white and black women weekly to Jackson, where they engaged in dialogue with their southern counterparts and took part in activities aimed at improving race relations. Even though the women involved in the interracial initiative wielded powerful political, economic, and social connections—including Etta Moten Barnett, a Broadway actress and wife of Associate Negro Press founder Claude Barnett, and Polly Cowan, heir of the Spiegel mail-order-catalog business and wife of a former CBS president—it was too dangerous for them to meet openly, so they worked clandestinely and were often segregated by race.

The NCNW proved to be flexible with its programming as WIMS gave way to "Workshops in Mississippi." The 1966 change came about as NCNW officials realized that WIMS did not challenge power structures or address poverty in the Magnolia State. To do so, the council needed to foster and support a strong coalition of grassroots black women activists in Mississippi rather than focus on facilitating interracialism. NCNW staff thus redefined its mission in that state to serve "as a liaison organization between black women in Mississippi and government agencies distributing War on Poverty funds" (p. 108). Additionally, the council looked for ways to support the state's most impoverished residents directly. One resulting initiative was a pig bank in the Mississippi Delta that addressed the problem of starvation. The NCNW purchased fifty-five pigs in 1968 and within five years, the pig bank had produced three thousand pigs. The pig bank, run by famed activist Fannie Lou Hamer, prevented white supremacists from using food as a "political weapon" (p. 128) to intimidate and coerce African Americans.

By the 1970s, the NCNW had rebranded itself as an organization speaking on behalf of black women worldwide. The council initiated rural cooperative projects in Mississippi and international aid projects in South Africa. During the 1980s, a desire to remain relevant led the NCNW to create and annually sponsor the Black Family Reunion, an event celebrating contemporary black families. The Black Family Reunion continues to exist today, having outlasted many other family-oriented marches.

Rebecca Tuuri offers readers a thorough analysis of the NCNW's history, documenting its achievements and shortcomings. She expands the cast of characters in black freedom struggles to include affluent black women. She shows that while creating avenues for women's leadership, which was a departure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the council sometimes replicated the top-down organizing traditions of those organizations. In doing so, the NCNW underutilized the grassroots leadership of local people in many of its initiatives. [End Page 631]

Despite its strengths, the book is uneven in scope, focusing predominately on the NCNW during the civil rights era. Readers are left wanting to know more about the council's earliest years of institution building. Another minor criticism is that Tuuri is relatively silent on NCNW activity outside of Mississippi. One wonderers what kinds of programming existed in urban areas and how place shaped the council's agenda. Nevertheless, Strategic Sisterhood is an important book worthy of careful study that expands the narrative about who is an agent of social change and complicates our understanding of what constitutes radical political work.

In Set the World on Fire, Keisha Blain makes the case for black women as Pan-Africanist leaders and strategists. In addition to organizing around voting and citizenship rights, some women pursued black nationalist politics throughout the United States and around the globe. Early in the book, Blain offers readers a concrete and succinct definition of black nationalism as "the political view that people of African descent constitute a separate group or nationality on the basis of their distinct culture, shared history, and experiences" (p. 3). She then disputes scholarship that characterizes the period from the 1920s until the 1960s as one of declining black nationalism, chronicling the era as a vibrant moment of strategy and collaboration across the African diaspora with women leaders at the center.

Perhaps Blain's most important contribution is claiming a place in intellectual history for working-poor black women as key thinkers and strategists in transnational black political movements in the decades after Marcus Garvey's 1927 deportation from the United States to Jamaica. The book's title, Set the World on Fire, is taken from the title of a 1942 article written by Josephine Moody, a member of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Moody wrote a piece entitled, "We Want to Set the World on Fire," that called for the immediate overthrow of global white supremacy in order to foster black liberation. In highlighting relatively obscure black women such as Moody who possessed a global racial consciousness and sophisticated political approaches to combat racism and discrimination, Blain builds on the work of historian Ula Taylor in The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002) debunking the notion of black men as the only thought leaders and producers of freedom dreams in Pan-Africanist movements and discourses.

Readers are introduced to several under-studied black women activists, including Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Amy Ashwood, Celia Jane Allen, and Maymie De Mena, who responded to antiblackness with calls for emigration to Africa and Pan-African unity. These political strategists saw no evidence to believe that the political, economic, and social situation for black people in the United States would improve, so they aimed to escape a "irredeemably racist" country (p. 106). Many of these women had been active in the UNIA. Blain asserts that the organization's collapse opened the door for these women [End Page 632] activists to expand their resistance to the global color line while expanding leadership opportunities for women. They drew on religious and political ideologies, including Islam and Ethiopianism, which was "race redemption ideas derived from biblical Ethiopia" (p. 63). These women also formed unlikely alliances with known white supremacists such as Theodore Bilbo to garner support for black emigration and shape national and global public policy in their favor. Blain suggests that the paradoxical collaborations were "acts of performance" women activists deployed as outsiders in a white-dominated, patriarchal society (p. 105).

In addition to highlighting overlooked black nationalist women, Set the World on Fire provides critical histories of black nationalist organizations. For example, readers learn that one-third of the UNIA's chapters were located in Central America by the early 1920s and by the mid-1920s, there were five hundred UNIA divisions and branches across the United States South. Readers are also persuasively shown how the UNIA stifled black women's leadership in favor of male domination. UNIA resistance to women leaders led to organizations like the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), founded by former UNIA member Mittie Gordon in Chicago in 1932. The PME was the largest black nationalist organization founded by a woman in the United States and boasted a nationwide membership of 300,000 at its peak. The organization's largely working-class black population called for black capitalism, political self-determination, and emigration to Liberia as the keys to black liberation. To achieve the latter goal, the PME dispatched recruiters to the Jim Crow South to convince African Americans to relocate abroad. Under Gordon's leadership, the PME submitted to President Franklin Roosevelt a petition with the signatures of 400,000 black Americans willing to leave the country.

Like Tuuri, Blain seeks to demonstrate the complexities and differences among activists. The black nationalist women featured did not share the same background, organizational affiliations, political ideas, or tactics. Thus, black nationalism encompasses a diverse array of strategies and should not be understood as monolithic or static. Blain also reveals that the agendas of black nationalist women were sometimes contradictory. While calling for more leadership opportunities for women within nationalist organizations, some women members simultaneously reinforced traditional gender constructions by encouraging women to maintain their natural roles as wives and mothers.

Another strength of Blain's book is her convincing characterization of Liberia as a utopia in the imaginations of black nationalist women during the twentieth century. Many of these women championed emigration to the West African nation as a practical solution for people of African descent to escape lynching, disfranchisement, and racial discrimination. They imagined Liberia as the site of wealth, black political independence, and black economic self-determination despite the country's massive debt and political corruption. [End Page 633] Whether these false images of the country were based on lack of knowledge or a belief in the impossible, the fact that so many African Americans longed to emigrate there proved just how dire their situation was in the United States.

Ironically, the book's strength in conveying the widespread interest in Liberia as a place for resettlement is also the book's only weakness. Blain does not provide much information about the black American emissaries who traveled to Liberia to assess conditions there and negotiate with Liberian officials. Who did the PME send to Liberia? What types of demands and concessions were made on both sides during those exploratory missions? Answers to these questions would provide a fuller account of what was possible with respect to emigration to Liberia.

Set the World on Fire offers readers a deeply researched synthesis of black women's efforts at "forging diaspora" (p. 146) throughout the twentieth century. No longer can scholars discuss early challenges to the global color line and only mention male Pan-Africanists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and C.L.R. James. Blain's work will serve as the new standard for scholarship on black internationalism and histories of black liberation.

In Mothers of Massive Resistance, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, like Tuuri and Blain, argues that women played central roles in national political movements, only this time the actors were conservative white women. Exploring the lives of four relatively unknown white women—Nell Battle Lewis, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker—McRae documents white supremacist women's daily grassroots efforts to preserve the racial status quo from 1920 until 1970. In the South and throughout the nation, white women drew on their identities as mothers, social workers, teachers, and political party activists to maintain white dominance and non-white subjugation. The first half of the book chronicles these women's support for racial segregation in the face of white apathy while the second half documents their massive resistance to racial equality. These segregationist gardeners, as she calls them, created, perfected, and perpetuated hurdles to the dismantling of the Jim Crow order. Even after federal legislation outlawed racial segregation, they proceeded with white supremacist politics "by stressing political conservatism, not race. They subsumed segregationist agendas under the larger umbrella of parental authority, constitutional integrity, limited government, national sovereignty, or school choice" (pp. 216–217).

McRae's most important contribution is the creation of a long massive resistance history, beginning during the Progressive era, with women at the center. While other historians such as Kevin Kruse in White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of White Conservatism (2005) and Jason Morgan Ward in Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (2011) have argued that massive resistance predated the 1954 Brown decision, McRae asserts that women were the key architects during [End Page 634] this earlier period. She makes the case that white supremacist women who secured bureaucratic employment in Virginia in the 1920s used their employment to "police physical and familial ties between black and white Americans" (p. 7). They alerted public officials to suspected mixed race individuals using whites-only hospitals; they reported to school authorities children who had characteristics indicating a less-than-pure-white background; and they worked in concert with midwives to prevent racial passing. In doing so, the women preserved white supremacy and proved that they understood segregation was only possible through local enforcement. Supreme Court decisions and federal and state laws alone could not maintain racial hierarchies.

White supremacist women's commitment to maintaining the racial status quo also extended to education. Southern states moved to centralize textbook selection during the 1920s while local adoption still dominated in the North. The advent of statewide textbook selection committees in the former Confederacy gave white women with political capital the opportunity to push a pro-white South interpretation in school textbooks by having to convince only a handful of people of their preferences. These women used textbooks to normalize racial segregation, minimize the barbarity of slavery, and essentially erase African Americans from history except in inferior roles. The women understood that even without the threat of desegregation, they had to bulwark white supremacy by teaching white over black and found the schoolhouse to be a ripe location for such work.

Another important intervention that McRae makes is to reperiodize political party realignment. She shows that southern white women left the Democratic Party in the 1930s, long before the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt. This shift to the Republican Party went unnoticed since the South remained a one-party region and because women did not have the same political opportunities as men. Over time, these southern Republican converts joined forces with conservative women in other parts of the country. They bonded over shared opposition to internationalism, a fear of eroding parental authority, and an aversion to busing. Thus, Mothers of Massive Resistance demonstrates that segregationist women played key roles in the spread of conservatism nationally. This assertion brings a feminine dimension to a political history that is usually rendered masculine.

In highlighting similarities and collaborations between conservative women nationwide, McRae problematizes nomenclature in historiography on massive resistance, the rise of conservatism, and segregation. She first dismisses the idea of a difference between de jure and de facto segregation by arguing that white southern women always understood that maintaining segregation required work beyond laws. She then critiques use of the word "anti-busers" to describe northern protestors who opposed busing. McRae asserts that the term is misleading in that those against busing "supported the persistence of racially imbalanced or segregated schools" (p. 231). The terminology hides [End Page 635] the reality that the same racist motives that governed segregationists' actions in the South were also at work in northern areas.

One slight criticism of Mothers of Massive Resistance is the limited examples provided to prove how essential white women were in maintaining white supremacy. It is not clear if white women bureaucrats worked with public officials across the South to root out race-mixing or if this was something unique to Virginia. Additionally, McRae does not provide statistics about the number of white southern women who joined the Republican Party during the interwar period. We do not know if her case study is indicative of a larger trend or simply an outlier. Despite these limitations, Mothers of Massive Resistance irrefutably shows the agency, reach, and power of white supremacist women.

All three authors make the case for the historical and political significance of their female subjects, yet somehow these women have faded into history. Their absence is a sobering reminder that historians implicitly and explicitly make choices about who counts and who should be remembered in the stories they tell. In their research, Tuuri, Blain, and McRae mined underused and previously untapped forms of evidence to center women's voices and experiences. The NCNW story came alive through Tuuri's extensive use of oral history interviews, black women's personal papers, and black newspapers. We get a rich understanding of the aspirations and imaginations of black nationalist women through Blain's use of unpublished songs and poetry, women's columns in black nationalist newspapers, and archival records written by black women. McRae sought out white women's manuscript collections, textbook commission records, and the private papers of social welfare leaders to provide an original account of segregation's fiercest defenders. Together, the three books shine a light on ordinary women from varied backgrounds who mobilized in support of causes they believed in. Their lives and actions serve as a powerful rebuke to historical iconography that privileges men. [End Page 636]