Unless otherwise noted, when I refer to “racism”, “white racism”, “white racist”, and similar terms without elaboration, I intend for white women to be included within the particular concept. However, there is evidence, relying on the preceding #8 installment of this “For Racial Healing” series, that white men have a greater bias against Blacks than white women, who are not subject to the same evolutionary stresses that have, according to the University of Michigan study, existed for white men.
At the same time, white women would have felt considerable pressures to be subservient to the protectors (in-group males). We certainly know history demonstrates that white women have felt for generations and centuries the dominance (and presumed, for most of that time, male superiority) of white men in marriage and various areas of endeavor, such as politics, religion, business, education, arts, etc., even though we’ve witnessed a legitimate correction to this strict dominance in recent years with white women having made measurable inroads into the white man’s reign.
I have had discussions with women on this subject, and the strongest argument for white women’s actions in support – even in limited ways – of certain civil rights initiatives, when white men, as a group, opposed with considerable vigor those very same initiatives in places, during the early stages of the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s, like Montgomery, Alabama and Little Rock, Arkansas, consists of the theory that white women could empathize directly with an oppressed segment of the population, such as Blacks, since white women had endured, for many centuries, much gender oppression from white males.
Now back to that discussion on racial healing in a church on the upper eastside of Manhattan, an occasion which only women attended, except for one other white man and me. The women conducted themselves in a way suggesting that the absence of men for a racial healing session had been a normal occurrence. And why shouldn’t it be normal? In 2020, one of my nonfiction books was published that dealt with a race- related event, and over two years, I gave more than 80 presentations on that book to organizations across the country (mainly via internet). For much of that time, I spoke principally to audiences of women – Black and white. Not all the time, but for much of the time.
Moreover, any follow-up to one of my lectures at a later date was usually initiated by a woman, not a man. There were white women who wished to re-establish relations with Black, childhood friends, for those relations had been severed by institutional forces through a school’s social milieu or racial policies or by familial forces through parents, grandparents, etc. Then, there were other women who wished to talk further about what could be done to reduce the impacts of filiopietism; these were the most emotionally and intensely draining as numerous white women routinely admitted their personal complicity in familial racism against Blacks. Worship of the past and ancestors had embedded itself in many of these women who would then adhere to the practices that made filiopietism, from their viewpoint, mostly impossible to break, as they articulated the pressures they felt over the years that had developed from family practice.
But now, they wondered how they could have allowed themselves to be manipulated that long ago so thoroughly and often, even over great, physical distances, and they routinely then asked the valid question: what could they do to unwind the power and effects of filiopietism? I had no comfortable answer for those women in those circumstances. Could they change their behavior codified so long ago? How many individual friendships and family relationships would have to be broken? And yet, those women were the persons to understand the power of authentic passion and the solution of one-to-one allyships that were available if they leaped to grasp it. Looking back over time, I have no idea how many took the leap.
Of course, there has been more than enough Black racial prejudice among white women to give attention to the various forms through which this bias toward Blacks has been sufficiently demonstrated. Much material and commentary show that white women share in white racism. What I’m also saying, though, is that a white women’s version of bias has, in many cases, shown itself to be different and less severe, intense, and certainly less brutal than white men’s applications.
When we look back to the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s with its mission being Black liberation and equality, the first three crucial events to come to mind that served as catalysts for stimulating civil rights actions, starting the middle of the 1950s, are Emmett Till’s mutilation and murder, which happened in August, 1955, followed four months later by the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott that ended after a year, to be succeeded in nine months thereafter by the first phase of the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crises.
The role that Carolyn Bryant performed in the mutilation and murder of Emmett Till, together with her representations in the subsequent, local trial, suggests a culpability and participation that depart dramatically from more positive contributions by white women in Montgomery and Little Rock, which we will cover shortly. Carolyn Bryant’s place in the Emmett Till narrative has been confusing and complicated from start to finish. Toward the end of her own life, she apparently voiced misgivings about her own recall of true events surrounding the particulars, without witnesses, of the Emmett Till-Carolyn Bryant conversation and encounter in the grocery store that preceded and incentivized Till’s mutilation and murder. Indeed, Carolyn Bryant confessed a number of years ago to the historian, Timothy Tyson, that an important piece of the Till story had been untrue about which she had lied for generations and decades. If that part of her earlier story were untrue, what other portions can we believe to be true, at least as told by Carolyn Bryant about what really happened between Emmett Till and her?
Nonetheless, the Carolyn Bryant problem does not alter that which we have discovered about certain white women’s attitudes and efforts in both Montgomery, Alabama and Little Rock, Arkansas during the crucial 1950s. The genuine, public roles of various white women are made quite clear in both the Montgomery and Little Rock instances.
For example, we do know, according to Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Parting The Waters, that at the start of the Montgomery bus boycott,
“Of the few people who bothered to write the Advertiser (prominent Montgomery, Alabama newspaper) at first, most were white women who saw it as a justifiable demand for simple, decent treatment.”
The boycott, which started on December 5, 1955, ended slightly more than a year later on December 20, 1956. Since the local business and governmental community, controlled by white men, refused to relent to initial, but less expansive demands by the Black population as those requests grew and developed over the period of the boycott, Montgomery white men tended to become more entrenched with more aggression being pursued against Blacks, especially against several of the boycott leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. While the actions in the context of the boycott by a number of white women in Montgomery, Alabama during the mid-1950s clearly were not equivalent to “going to the barricades”, they were, at the same time, not reflective of the much less sympathetic and harsher reactions to the bus boycott then being expressed by large numbers of white men in Montgomery, up and down the social and economic spectrum.
Notwithstanding the combative acts by white men, the bus boycott in Montgomery continued uninterrupted month after month. At one point, Mayor W. A. Gayle voiced his frustration at the lack of Black capitulation, lashing out at white women in town, saying publicly that if the white women in Montgomery would cease picking up Black women in the morning at predetermined locations and returning them back home in the afternoon, the bus boycott could then be broken. At the time, there were also reports of white women in cars picking up Black women as they walked to or from work and driving them to their destinations. Even though these were modest steps by a number of white women in Montgomery, lending support to Black efforts, they were certainly a far cry from the aggression and violence being perpetrated by many white men in the city against Blacks at that time.
Although their deeds came late during the two-year crisis period, white women were even more engaged in Little Rock for helping to resolve politically and institutionally the issues associated with the integration of Central High School that led to a major federal-state confrontation.
Through a series of legal decisions in the federal court system, including numerous applications and judicial clarifications, Little Rock, Arkansas was chosen – rather, more specifically – Little Rock Central High School was chosen to be compelled to integrate in accordance with a gradual integration plan, drawn up by the local Superintendent of Schools, a white man. Little Rock Central seemed like a logical choice for the initial, major, urban school in the South to be integrated in accordance with the Brown decision. After all, in the midst of the trauma and violence that accompanied the Montgomery bus boycott, the City of Little Rock had integrated its bus system in April, 1956 without much difficulty. King referenced on occasion this Little Rock experience during the Montgomery maelstrom.
In the fall of 1958, less than two weeks before the election that led to closure of high schools in Little Rock, a white women’s organization with the name, the Women’s Emergency Committee (“WEC”), was formed to solicit support for open schools. Consisting of the wives of many of the white male business leaders of Little Rock, WEC members had access to influential, local levers of power that few organizations could match. It has also been suggested that members of WEC may have even withheld sex to persuade their husbands to see WEC’s point of view.
Their efforts fell short in the election that closed the high schools, but WEC’s strength and tactics improved over the following months, so that when segregationists’ members of the school board voted not to employ teachers or administrators whom these board members believed supported integration, WEC, together with a number of local businessmen, established STOP (Stop This Outrageous Purge) and worked to recall the three segregationist board members. With WEC’s considerable assistance, STOP won the recall election with the addition of three moderate members, breaking control of the Little Rock School Board by the staunch, segregationist Governor. The Little Rock public high schools were then reopened in August, 1959, but not at the level of integration that Black leadership in the city had wanted. Moreover, one would have wished for WEC to be an integrated women’s group, but alas, it wasn’t, so we must temper our optimism about the basic, non-racist tendencies of these white women.
This installment has shown that there can be a difference between white women and white men in attitude and intensity toward Black liberation and racial healing. It is clear that there have been instances where white women have assisted Black initiatives to achieve Black goals. That particular role by a meaningful portion of white women was illustrated in both the Montgomery bus boycott and the Little Rock Central High School crisis. This is not to say that white women can’t be serious racists. I’ve witnessed the reality of women racists, including those within my own family. However, there is reason to think many white women are inclined to acknowledge and deal with racism, both generally and personally, including a willingness to work with anti-racism programs and goals that lead to adjusted, racial behavior.
As we consider steps regarding the proposed protocol for racial healing, it is important to keep in mind distinctions affecting white prejudice between white women and white men. My comments underscore the point that the prejudice of white men will need to be addressed in a somewhat different, more concentrated manner that would include acknowledgment of white men’s distinguishable prejudice toward Blacks.
American white women have not been in positions, generally speaking, as opposed to white men, even to apply a more fulsome and longer-term empathetic response to Black-white racial healing. While the times are changing, there has not been enough breadth to open wider the avenues for much more visible encouragement from American white women, who have therefore been at crossroads with their prospects for a more generous intent toward Blacks. Even though racism against Blacks certainly exists among American white women, we do not know what the results could possibly be for Black-white racial healing if the crossroads were somehow transformed into a clearer and cleaner path.
Next Time: “Those We Abuse, We Loathe.”