Doctoral Candidate William Robert Billups has published a new article in the March 2023 issue of the Journal of American History. Titled “Martyred Women and White Power since the Civil Rights Era: From Kathy Ainsworth to Vicki Weaver,” the article analyzes how the martyrdom of two women by white supremacists contributed to the development of transnational white supremacist networks and ideologies. Billups is currently completing his dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1971,” which is advised by Drs. Joseph Crespino and Allen Tullos. Read a summary of the article, published on the blog of the Organization of American Historians, below.

In 1968, Mississippi policemen fatally shot Kathy Ainsworth, a Ku Klux Klan bomber and pregnant schoolteacher, during a sting operation. Decades later, a Federal Bureau of Investigation sniper killed Vicki Weaver, an Idaho white supremacist mother, during a standoff. Both women became martyrs, and today transnational white supremacist communities revere them as antigovernment symbols. William Robert Billups tracks Ainsworth and Weaver across far-right collective memory to analyze the development of modern white supremacist ideologies and networks. He argues that discourses about persecuted white mothers helped spawn far-right antistatism. His study provides new insights into women’s roles in white supremacist movements and demonstrates how anxieties about white motherhood and procreation have fueled antigovernment extremism since the civil rights era.