At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
"An important step to finally facing the terrible legacies of race and gender in this country.” — The Washington Post
Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written.
In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer--Rosa Parks--to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against Black women and added fire to the growing call for change.
Reviews (152)
If he is going to make stupid statements he should know his facts
Should be taught in all schools. It documents the special ongoing oppression of black women by rape. They grew up knowing their bodies were not their own but the property of any passing white. This book documents the courage with which they fought back against overwhelming odds to report these crimes and receive legal justice and the ongoing failure of state and federal powers to take steps. The bus boycott was organized and led by women against a system where bus drivers were free to beat them and sexually harass them. Many were beaten and raped and lost their jobs but in the face of death did not give up. The crimes detailed here are horrid to read but the courage of the women and men who protested should not be forgotten. The book has a lot of footnotes and a long bibliography for those who want to read more and she has interviewed many who took part. Others have pointed that Rosa Parks was an active freedom fighter and that other women had been protesting bus unequal practices. It is well written and very readable. Mike Ditka football player who just stated there has been no oppression in 100 yrs should be forced to read this. If he is going to make stupid statements he should know his facts.
I want to tell every white person to read this book
I want to tell every white person to read this book. To read it all the way through and then sit down and think about it. Take notes. Think about it some more. Does this narrative match what you learnt at school? Does it match your experience growing up? Does this USA resemble the USA you have been living in? At the Dark End of the Street is a hard read. Inside we learn about what happened to Recy Taylor in detail. About all of the work Rosa Parks was doing years before she refused to get up from that bus seat. About the countless cases of brutality and rape of black women by white men. Of the countless cases where white women called rape on innocent black men. Be prepared to be sickened by the institutionalized suffering, and also by the fact that your fellow humans doled this violence out on a daily basis, and still do. A detailed and acute research on the involvement and importance of women in the civil rights movement, this book is also a deep insight into the horrific and widespread use of sexual violence by white men to keep black women silent and to exert dominance. Sexual violence is often used as a weapon in war, we have seen many examples of this in the past and in the present, but the extent of its use in the US, and how it was constantly disregarded by the authorities, or even used against victims, is abhorrent. But these stories must be told because they should never be erased and forgotten. In addition to being a huge minefield of information, events, and facts that are not taught in history books, this book is an important reminder of how black women’s voices have been consistently erased through time. Their overwhelming role in the Montgomery bus boycott reduced to a mere footnote, the tireless activism years and years before the civil rights movement took off stuffed away in the vaults of an archive, and the work that they continue to do on a daily basis forgotten. There is so much important information in this book, sometimes it actually feels overwhelming and frustrating at the same time because it really should be common knowledge. I initially got this one from the library, but I bought a copy for myself as I feel like I only scratched the surface by reading it once and need to be able to refer back to it again and again. Can we add this book to the curriculum please? My kids will be asked to read it as soon as they are old enough to.
A Difficult Book To Read, But Read It Anyway
As an African American woman who grew up in segregated Atlanta, I felt violated while reading about the rapes and indignities by white men against black women. I often rode the public bus home from school and the bus drivers were all white and nasty. This book brought up all those feelings and more. I will never understand how white women who had consensual relations with black men could accuse them of rape when they knew those men would be tortured and lynched by mobs. The depravity of those killing mobs is incomprehensible to me. If you don’t know this history, educate yourself.
This Book Will Change Your Life or at Least Your Perspective
This was an excellent book. I read it for a Women's Studies course and am so glad I did. It is a hard read at times due to the subject matter and I got chills over and over with every page I turned. This is a dense read so full of information, facts, and, the best part in my opinion, stories that hit you straight in your emotions (I am not ashamed to admit I got a little teary eyed at times). The Civil Rights Movement in the US is definitely taken for granted and has been whittled down to little bites of history where MLK Jr. is glorified and positioned as the center piece but if you read this book you'll learn there was so so much more to it and that once again history bears its burden on the backs of so many brave black women.
This is the history that should be taught in schools
This is a fabulously well-done telling of the history behind the Civil Rights Movement and the momentum it carried forward. I've bought nearly a dozen copies for friends. McGuire skillfully and enthrallingly takes two-dimensional historical icons and turns them back into real people. The gaps in the stories we've learned are filled with people in whom we can see ourselves. This book makes history palpable and therefore that much more comprehensible. Highly recommend.
Alternatingly Fascinating & Horrifying: A Great Read
If you thought that the Civil Rights Movement began in the 1950's or 1960's, that Rosa Parks was a reticent old woman with tired feet, that the movement started suddenly after her refusal to move from her seat on a bus, I urge you to read this. You'll learn: - that Rosa Parks was raised a Garveyite, and had been an activist and NAACP leader for more than 20 years when she famously refused to move from her seat, - that this very seat was located on a bus whose driver had (less famously) harassed Ms. Parks 10 years before, and that she also knew E.D. Nixon was searching for a victim of racial violence who was "beyond reproach" to gain national media attention, and SO much more! I should add that I usually find history books a little boring, but this was very readable...
We all know and love Rosa Parks as the tired woman who refused to ...
McGuire opens with an extremely in depth account of the rape of Recy Taylor. The reader plummets into dialogue and descriptions that pertain to the rape of a woman coming home from church. Another woman enters the picture and her name is Rosa Parks, she is the investigator sent by the NAACP to document and assess this incident. In the first few pages of her book, Danielle McGuire has already made us question, why have we never heard this before? We all know and love Rosa Parks as the tired woman who refused to give up her seat, an action that supposedly started the Civil Rights Movement, and now we are informed that she was one of the NAACP’s best investigators? How perverse, that we would not know this history. Historiographies such as McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street “stresses the abilities of southern black communities… the force that developed the infrastructure of the civil rights movement ”. Danielle McGuire presents us with a narrative of defending black womanhood as a means of fighting against white supremacy. Recy Taylor, and others like her, though rarely able to bring their attackers to justice, used their voices and their stories as direct action against the status quo.
Drivel attempting to filter black history through a feminist lense
McGuire might have had every intention of highlighting the bravery of the female contingent of what became the Civil Rights movement but I doubt it. It's a ahistorical bridge too far to paint the men as chauvinistic glory mongers denying these brave sisters their credit. Black men were also boycotting the bus system because they were also being mirdere and beaten by white supremacists at the time. McGuire tried to paint a picture of cowardly ministers deciding it was best Parks didn't speak at a rally while insinuating she declined as well. Which is it? These ministers also railed against the somewhat radical moves of a young Martin Luther King because of the viciousness of murderous whites at the time, the purveyors of a milieu she definitely could have painted with more depth. Meh, it was a good historical account before all of the agenda framing nonsense.
Placing Black Women at the center yields very good results
The most salient part of this book is the perspective. The look at the beginnings of the civil rights movement from the eyes of Black women, who are often pushed to the margins in historical works, was a welcome addition to the civil rights historical canon. Because Ms. McGuire centered her book in this way, the reader will learn the names of women here, that contributed mightily to the struggle for not only civil rights but human dignity. For those who have read little history, you will find information about icons like Rosa Parks that goes beyond the standard high school fare. Other historical figures will be properly placed, as to their roles in pivotal events like the Montgomery Bus boycott. And for the well versed in civil rights history, much of this may be familiar ground. Claudette Colvin is certainly a familiar name for this crowd, however I doubt Rosa Lee Ingram is similiarly intimate. It is the stories of these women, that become the launching point for discussions around sexual terrorism that makes this book well worth the investment. I don't think we understand how deeply the lives of Black families were impacted by sexual terrorism, At The Dark End of the Street, does a very good job of illuminating the horror. This one should be added to your collection!
The real civil rights movement
I bought this book quite a while ago, but it inadvertently ended up getting buried in my to be read stack. I suppose it's just as well, because I ended up reading it in the context of the Trayvon Martin killing which has taken up so many column inches and so much bandwidth lately. Although the Martin case is not directly relevant to Danielle McGuire's theme of sexualized violence against blacks, particularly black women, it is instructive to see many of the same themes being played out as were played out 50+ years ago, leading one to wonder how much progress the Civil Rights Movement has made since its peak in the mid-1970s, or whether we might even have gone backward despite the election of the first black president. Ms. McGuire starts by pointing out the myth of Rosa Parks: that she was a reserved, reticent, respectable and tired old black woman who made a spontaneous choice which spontaneously ignited the Civil Rights Movement. That myth was arguably necessary in the context of the explosive violence against blacks in the mid-twentieth century and the need for "respectability" in finding a sympathetic "face" of the movement, but the myth also obscures the reality of the originals of the Civil Rights Movement (and Rosa Parks' real role in it), which was not a spontaneous event starting in the mid-1950s, but rather a final rolling boil resulting from the heat of black women's anger of the decades' (or perhaps centuries') long violation of their bodily integrity and womanhood while "pure" white womanhood was staunchly protected and grounds for lynching of any black man who dared to cross the color line. Equal rights was, to hear Southern whites tell it, only a convenient cover for lustful black men to despoil the flower of white Southern womanhood. I'd argue that it's nearly impossible to date the start of the Civil Rights Movement. Long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, Harriet Tubman was leading slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, and long before her Africans and African-Americans were fighting slavery from the day the first blacks were taken into slavery, although their names have mostly been lost to history. Nonetheless, Ms. McGuire starts her story with Rosa Parks. Not the prim and proper Rosa Parks we all think we know, but the militant civil rights activist who defended women like Mrs. Recy Taylor, abducted and raped by seven white men in the early 1940s. In addition to that case, Parks traveled far and wide throughout the South listening to and documenting black women's and girl's sexual degradation at the hands of white men. She helped to draw attention to these outrages and bring them to justice in Southern courts, a tall order during the height of Jim Crow. Although Parks was never successful in securing justice against the perpetrators of such crimes, she did succeed in raising awareness and laying the groundwork for many of the Civil Rights victories in the decades to come. Nor did she work alone. In fact, McGuire argues, despite the male faces we now associate with the Civil Rights Movement, it was from inception a movement of women for women to reclaim - or, rather, claim for the first time - their right to bodily integrity. The richly varied hues of the complexions of African-Americans testifies to the phoniness of racist concerns over "miscegenation" and the "amalgamation" of the races. Since slavery days, white masters had raped and sexually dominated the bodies of black women, subjecting them to every sort of indignity. Black women were not safe walking in any neighborhood, whether "good" or "bad". Black women working in white homes, offices and factories were not safe from their white employers and co-workers. Black women endured humiliation and abuse riding the public buses. And black women in jail or prison - whether on legitimate or, more often, trumped up charges - were in the greatest danger of all with almost no protection or recourse. At the same time as white men were wreaking havoc on black women's bodies, white women's bodies were sacrosanct, at least from black men. The slightest violation, real or alleged, by a black man of the South's strict segregation codes was grounds for at best, arrest, at worst, summary lynching. Such strict measures were necessary, argued white demagogues, because lustful black men wanted nothing more than to ravish white women and were utterly unable to contain their bases urges. Pot, kettle, anyone? Finally, black women had had enough. The had virtually no power. The courts would not recognize their claims and, in fact, made them the guilty parties by smearing them as "prostitutes" and women of "low" character. Even black men were reluctant to stand up due to fears of reprisal But the women had one thing: their voices. More and more black women came forward to speak and testify about the abuses they suffered. Little by little they refused to be victims anymore. And little by little society heard (although, sadly, they usually heard a lot better when whites got involved). But the more society at large heard, the more the militant Southerners regrouped to protect "the Southern Way of Life". This book has a bit of a repetitive feel to it, but actually it's more layered. In chapter after chapter, McGuire focuses on a case that became famous and represented an important milestone in the Movement, while weaving in dozens of similar cases and opposing cases where the races were reversed. In each case, the pattern is roughly the same, but each time small gains are made moving public awareness and black outrage and white retaliation one step closer to confrontation, one step closer to justice. In the meantime, McGuire has piled on so many episodes of white on black violence and injustice that it is impossible to deny that this was anything other than an entrenched, universal pattern throughout the South. Black women were repeatedly victimized, then re-victimized by having the character publically smeared, while white Southern society rallied around the perpetrators and further intimidated blacks. But blacks would not be silenced, and slowly the tide turned. From Recy Taylor, who could not get justice after being raped by seven white men to Joan Little who was acquitted of killing the white jailer who attempted to rape her, black women changed the course of history and reclaimed the rights to their own bodies. Furthermore, the issue of "respectability" was dealt a painful blow. Even as a married woman and mother, Recy Taylor was not deemed "respectable" enough in 1942. Joan Little, on the other hand, was decidedly not "respectable, yet by 1975 she could be the face of the Movement. White women finally began recognizing what their black sisters had been speaking truth to power for decades: no woman, regardless of her past or her behavior, deserved to be raped. But now, another 35+ years later, we are dealing with the case of an unarmed dead black teenager and trying to decide if he was on drugs, what his school suspensions might have meant, and other hints that he might have deserved to die. And just like our compatriots decades ago, we argue with all seriousness that race isn't the issue in this case - everything would, of course, be exactly the same had the races been reversed. Of course! Of course a black George Zimmerman would have been released after killing a white/Latino Trayvon Martin and claiming self defense. In this post-racial, "colorblind" world, race no longer matters and the racists are the ones who say it does. This book is essential reading for a "post-racial" world. If anything, I'd like to see Ms. McGuire continue her thesis with an exploration of the time since Joan Little's historic victory. Although the patterns are more subtle - few whites dare openly use the N-word anymore, for instance, the can still be seen shimmering beneath the veneer of polite, "colorblind" American society in the twenty-first century.
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