Yesterday, 2nd March 2016, the Centre was
pleased to welcome Dr. Helen Laville (University of
Birmingham) as part of the 2015-2016 seminar series. In what was a fascinating
and informative talk, Dr. Laville discussed ‘The Gentle Weapon: Social Ostracism as a Weapon of Massive
Resistance in Montgomery Alabama.’ This area of research
developed out of a book project, titled ‘Women, Guided
and Misguided: Organized White Women and the Challenge of Race Relations
1930-1965’ and concerns the opinions and reactions of women to
segregation and integration in the South. The paper
Dr. Laville gave yesterday focused more specifically on the efforts of citizens
in Montgomery, Alabama to repress support for racial integration in their city
in the years after the bus boycott. Below is this listener’s
brief summary of the lecture.
Dr. Laville’s talk began with an event: a
secret interracial meeting of a women’s prayer group at St. Jude’s Hospital on
September 27, 1957 in Montgomery. In the midst of the civil rights movement,
these women, under the auspices of the ‘Fellowship of the Concerned’, met to
discuss their role after a string of events, including the Bus Boycott and an historic
Supreme Court decision, had brought the issue of integration in the South to
the fore. With a copy of the newspaper that reported on the meeting, it was
clear that these moves were not welcomed by a large contingent of the local
community. As the paper reported,
Montgomery,
our home town, the Cradle of the Confederacy, long regarded as a stronghold of
the Deep South now holds the distinction as being the site of a recent
itner-racial (sic) meeting devoted to the general theme of “the problem of
integration.”
Indeed, the racism that respectable
white southerners had hidden behind a veneer of civility and respectability was
forcefully challenged by moves to integrate the south. For example, Car Tags were also printed in the newspaper report to reveal the
names of those attending the rally. (Although it was the names of the husbands
that were printed, the newspaper went to great lengths to show that no men
attended the event). As Dr. Laville highlighted, this was part of a larger
effort by groups like the White Citizens Council (WCC) to make a pariah out of
anyone who did not fully embrace segregation.
Fearing that the wall representing segregation
would come crushing down if even the slightest crack appeared, these groups
moved quickly to supress support for racial integration. As Dr. Laville
demonstrated, not all of these integration opponents
were comic-book southern racists, exemplified by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
The WCC for example, was seen as a respectable
alternative to the KKK. They preached a policy of law and order, and their
attempts to silence moderate women in the south tended to rely on forms of
social and economic isolation, rather than intimidation or physical harm (that
is not to say that all of the WCC’s supporters marched to the same drumbeat
though).
Nevertheless, by focusing on the WCC’s attack
on this small interracial women’s prayer group, Dr. Laville used this episode
to examine the extent to which the WCC sought to define massive resistance as a
socially acceptable position, encouraging women to use their social influence
to exclude and supress any suggestions that the city yield to racial
integration. Social ostracism became the ‘gentle weapon’ as society shunned
those that supported the civil rights movement, however subtly. It was not clubs,
fire hoses, or vicious attack dogs, but this form of deep-seated psychological pressure
still had an impact and the pain of social persecution was very real for these
women.
Therefore, in an engaging talk, Dr.
Laville provided a more nuanced – and accurate – understanding of what white
southerners believed and what they did in reaction to integration in southern
communities. Away from the headline events of bus boycotts, restaurant sit-ins,
and harrowing protest marches, the subtle resistance or support of the civil
rights agenda by white women is an important and underdeveloped field of
scholarship. Indeed, it is only through projects like these that we can get a
well-rounded view of history.
The seminar
series will continue next week (Wednesday 9th March) with Professor
Elizabeth Natalle (University of North Carolina at Greenboro) 'Michelle Obama
and the Rhetoric of American First Lady Politics.' Here Prof. Natalle will
share a case study of Michelle Obama's highly successful Let's Move! campaign
in which the strategy of using co-rhetors to create communal agency for change
has lowered childhood obesity and influenced federal policy for healthy eating.
This will take place in Room 208, 2 University Gardens at 5.15pm. All very
welcome!
Joe
Ryan-Hume
PGR
at The University of Glasgow
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