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 Pow

Groundbreaking, controversial, and courageous, here is the story of Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor--a story that reinterprets the history of America's civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed against Black women by white men.

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.

Author: Danielle L. McGuire
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 10/04/2011
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 8.01h x 5.28w x 0.83d
ISBN13: 9780307389244
ISBN10: 0307389243
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Civil Rights
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- Social Science | Women's Studies

About the Author
Danielle L. McGuire was born in Janesville, Wisconsin. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She is an assistant professor in the History Department at Wayne State University and lives in Detroit, Michigan.