Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era.

Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era. Edited by Gail S. Murray. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 250. $59.95, ISBN 0-8130-2726-8.)

If the modern civil rights movement was indeed a revolution, especially for the South, then our understanding of its history must include how the struggle for racial justice changed the region. Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era provides a way to grasp the scope of the South's transformation through the study of white women activists and the organizations they led and joined. According to Gail S. Murray, "this collection has no intention of wresting the locus of civil rights activity away from the African Americans who envisioned, led, and lived 'the movement'" (p. 5). Instead, Murray explains, "to bring together a collection of research on southern white civil rights activists is less to rewrite the play than to enlarge the cast of characters" (p. 6).

This anthology has breadth and depth. Many southern states are represented here, and both rural and urban areas are studied. The book provides us with more evidence to expand the boundaries of the standard narrative of civil rights history. Instead of beginning with the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and ending with Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, this compilation begins in 1918 with the work of Dorothy Rogers Tilly in Georgia and ends with the activism of women in Memphis during the years after 1968. The progression of the civil rights movement is evident throughout the volume as black activism opened up possibilities for change that are revealed in each chapter.

The first four chapters focus on individual women in chronological order of their activism: Dorothy Tilly, Alice Norwood Spearman Wright, Frances Freeborn Pauley, and Anne McCarty Braden. The final four chapters highlight organizations that rallied members in the aftermath of the Brown decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act: the United Church Women in South Carolina, the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools in Little Rock, Save Our Schools in New Orleans, and various organizations in Memphis. While all of the chapters make a contribution to modern southern history, Marcia G. Synnott's essay on Alice Spearman and Catherine Fosl's essay on Anne Braden are examples of the strong work in the first section of this volume. In both chapters the activism of the individual is incorporated into a broader historical context that enables the reader to learn about more than the work of each woman. Gail S. Murray's essay on women activists in Memphis is representative of the importance of the second section of the book. In her well-researched chapter, the interplay between major events and local people provides needed context to understand the complexity of racial change in the South.

The strength of this book lies in its new scholarship. Individually, each essay contributes to our knowledge of specific women and their efforts during a particular time. Most of the people featured in this volume will not be familiar to the average reader since their work has been recently uncovered. Many may know of the significance of Anne Braden and Frances Pauley, but the contributions of these women is put into a specific context. Each essay also helps the reader penetrate the label of "white southern lady" to reveal important differences within this large category. The women featured here also traverse the "spectrum from radical to moderate," which helps to explain the various ways they participated in altering the South (p. 14).

As a whole, there are patterns that extend across the essays and expose the historical context that enabled change to take place. On the personal level, most of these women came of age during periods of change (after World War I, during the Great Depression and World War II, and after the Brown decision). They married men who supported their activism and were able to manage their family responsibilities because they did not have many children. These women had earlier connections to important feminist institutions and organizations such as an all-female undergraduate experience, the Young Women's Christian Association, the League of Women Voters, and the United Church Women. These national organizations encouraged local affiliates to participate in interracial activities that influenced many of the women featured in this volume. And they provided an opportunity for leadership development and contacts with like-minded women who provided support and encouragement. Often an important mentor emerged from these experiences who prepared the way for later activism of the mentee. Through their contacts across the Jim Crow divide, many of these women had their own racial conversion experiences that led to a new understanding of race in the South and how to use their racial identity for change. This new awareness led many to acknowledge segregation's power as an instrument of white supremacy and not just racial etiquette, and they came to view black people as their equals. Class also played a crucial role in their ability to traverse the contours of southern society. Finally, their activism transformed many of these white women and led them to become involved in other work for a more just society.

This is an important compilation. It is worthy of a paperback edition that would reach a wider audience.

SUSAN YOUNGBLOOD ASHMORE

Oxford College of Emory University