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Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Vintage
September 2010
On Sale: September 7, 2010
352 pages ISBN: 0307389243 EAN: 9780307389244 Kindle: B003F3PLMG Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction History
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 to
Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks. In taking on this case,
Parks launched a movement that ultimately changed the
world.
The author gives us the never-before-told
history of how the civil rights movement began; how it was
in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of
black women by white men who used economic intimidation,
sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement;
and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim
Crow era when white men assaulted black women to enforce
rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s
protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled
civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began
during World War II and went through to the Black Power
movement. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not
the birth, of that struggle.
AT THE DARK END OF THE
STREET describes the decades of degradation black women on
the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to cook and
clean for their white bosses. It reveals how Rosa Parks, by
1955 one of the most radical activists in Alabama, had had
enough. “There had to be a stopping place,” she said, “and
this seemed to be the place for me to stop being pushed
around.” Parks refused to move from her seat on the bus, was
arrested, and, with fierce activist Jo Ann Robinson,
organized a one-day bus boycott.
The protest,
intended to last twenty-four hours, became a yearlong
struggle for dignity and justice. It broke the back of the
Montgomery city bus lines and bankrupted the
company.
We see how and why Rosa Parks, instead of
becoming a leader of the movement she helped to start, was
turned into a symbol of virtuous black womanhood, sainted
and celebrated for her quiet dignity, prim demeanor, and
middle-class propriety—her radicalism all but erased. And we
see as well how thousands of black women whose courage and
fortitude helped to transform America were reduced to the
footnotes of history.
A controversial, moving,
and courageous book; narrative history at its best.
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