“I wished I didn’t have to keep on those white gloves but I kept them on.”
HOPE, southern white women, and the desegregation of public schools
After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, many southern states passed school closure laws to avoid integration. These laws gave governors or other state or local leaders the power to close their public schools should they be forced to ingrate them.
In 1959, the folks in charge of Prince Edward County, Virginia actually used their authority to close the county’s public schools. According to the Virginia Museum of Culture and History:
After Virginia’s school-closing law was ruled unconstitutional in January 1959, the General Assembly repealed the compulsory school attendance law and gave the state’s counties and cities the option of operating public schools—the “local option” allowed officials to choose to close public schools. Most localities, some after legal disputes, moved to integrate their school systems. That was not the case in Prince Edward County, however. Ordered by two courts on May 1, 1959 to integrated its schools, the county instead closed its entire public school system.
It would take five years to reopen the schools.
During the late 1950s and 1960s, as civil rights activists took their local school districts to court, the threat of public school closure was heightened. As such, several open schools political groups sprung up across the American South. Lead by mostly middle- and upper-class white women, these groups were grassroots organizations. They worked to keep their state’s public schools open—attempting to keep the focus on education; not integration or segregation.
Among these groups were:
Help Our Public Education (HOPE) in Atlanta;
Mississippians for Public Education (MEP) in Jackson;
Save Our Schools (SOS) in New Orleans; and the
Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC) in Little Rock.
In Georgia, HOPE was founded to counteract a potential school crises brought forth by the state’s segregationist political leaders.
In response to the Brown decision, the Georgia General Assembly passed a series of laws to fight desegregation—including a law that called for closing the state’s public schools should they be forced to integrate. The law basically said: no integration or no schools.
By January 31, 1960, as the Atlanta Public Schools were facing court ordered integration, the crisis had reached a boiling point. As the New York Times reported:
The approach of the Deep South’s first showdown over school desegregation has stirred widespread concern here [in Atlanta] because of the accompanying threat to the continuance of public education. But neither Gov. S. Ernest Vandiver nor the Legislature has shown any inclination to change segregation laws that might ultimately close every classroom in the state.
So, a group of women from Atlanta’s Northside sprung into action, created the HOPE organization, and used their lobbying power to put pressure on the governor and state legislature—trying to convince them to change the law and keep the schools open.
HOPE, like the other open schools organizations, relied on women’s gender roles to accomplish their political goals. Specifically, they leaned-in on the image of the southern lady as a warrant for meddling into the integration question.
Here’s how historian Michael Lassiter described it:
As an organization that entered the public arena under the rubric of parenthood, framing its rhetorical appeals around the protection of innocent children, HOPE was tapping into a political tradition with deep historical roots. Although men played key roles in the open-schools movement from the very beginning, HOPE elaborately cultivated a public image of concerned motherhood, speaking not only as respectable middle-class housewives but even more powerfully as genteel southern ladies.
But this southern lady(ness) was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, southern white women activists used their image as ladies to protect themselves from segregationist vitriol. As professor of American studies Anne Stefani has pointed out, this is why “lady manners and dress became part and parcel of the women’s tactical apparatus during the school desegregation crisis.”
Reflecting on the importance of manners and dress in an interview in 1983, HOPE member Frances Pauley said:
I remember it was a very hot day and there wasn’t any air conditioning but I had dressed properly to go before them [the Georgia legislature] and I had on a black dress or a navy blue dress with a bit of white trim on it with white gloves and a white hat, and I remember how hot my hands were and how I wished I didn’t have to keep on those white gloves but I kept them on.
Of course, Frances Pauley and the other women fighting to save Georgia’s public schools understood the political necessity of keeping on their white gloves.
This southern lady identity, on the other hand, limited what these women activists could do. Because, as Stefani has made clear, “the ideal of the southern lady was also a powerful instrument of control within the white community.”
Historian Elizabeth Jacoway summarized the submissive and white supremacist identity of the southern lady this way:
In return for male protection, the lady became the arbiter of morality, the custodian of conscience—within the sphere of her household. The mythological contract of “the lady” did not fade away after the Civil War: it remained a characteristic and unifying element of the “southern way of life”…
The proper southern women continued to aspire to elevated standards of “ladylike” behavior, admonished by fathers and husbands to cultivate a deferential attitude and to function in subordinate roles… the southern lady’s complicity in this whole scheme was the key to the maintainence of elite white male dominance of southern society…
At the heart of the arrangement was the lady’s absolute protection against sexual advances by black men: as the guarantor of the purity of white bloodlines, she bore the ultimate responsibility for the preservation of white civilization.
In other words, the southern lady fulfilled specific duties within the white supremacist patriarchy that governed the American South. But, by arguing for open schools (and, by extension, for desegregation), women like Frances Pauley began to redefine what it meant to be a southern lady. And, in doing so, they chipped away at Jim Crow’s racial structures as well as its gender ones.
More to come soon…
Primary Sources
Associated Press. “Atlanta Faces Historic Decision: Desegregate or Close Schools.” Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. January 11, 1959. MSS 427, H.O.P.E., INC. (Help Our Public Education) Records, Box 5, Folder 3, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA.
Pauley, Francis. Interview by Lenecia L. Bruce and Rosalie Fitzpatrick on September 20, 1983. Manuscript Collection No. 773, League of Women Voters of Dekalb County (Dekalb County, GA), Box 17, Folder 11 (Oral Histories), Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archive, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
Sitton, Claude. “Georgia Aroused by School Crisis.” The New York Times. January 31, 1960.
Secondary Sources
Jacoway, Elizabeth. “Down from the Pedestal: Gender and Regional Culture in a Ladylike Assault on the Southern Way of Life.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Autumn, 1997): 345-352.
Lassiter, Matthew D. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Stefani, A. “Image, Discourse, Facts: Southern White Women in the Fight for Desegregation, 1954-1965.” Miranda 5 (2011): 1-17.