Bo Buford

Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Goff, Brendan

Keywords

The Florida Division, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow, Postwar

Area of Concentration

History

Abstract

By addressing the activity of the Florida Division, United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) throughout the height of the civil rights movement, this thesis contributes toward filling a gap in historical study on the formation of the new conservatism. Existing scholarship recognizes that the UDC’s many activities and agendas (historical, memorial, benevolent, educational, and social) served to legitimize the enforcement of Jim Crow legislation by reinforcing an historical narrative of white supremacy in the South. However, historians have neglected to seriously consider the UDC’s work after 1920 or through the Cold War-era civil rights movement. In addition to scholarship on the UDC’s work in the Gilded Age, the historiography of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the parallel processes of federal expansion and economic imperialism in U.S. policy, this thesis draws upon primary texts including official publications of the Florida Division, materials donated to the State Archives of Florida by the Anna Jackson Chapter No. 224 of Tallahassee, and the papers of Cora Morse, a club leader who served in leadership positions at the local and division level of the UDC. The sources range from 1935 to 1970, thus starting at the height of the New Deal and ending just after the New Deal coalition began to fragment.. This thesis proposes that the Florida Division intentionally tempered its public image to preserve both its institutional reputation and political white supremacy amid formal attacks on Jim Crow in the postwar era.

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