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

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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

by Danielle L. McGuire (Goodreads Author)

4.34 of 5 stars 4.34 · rating details · 312 ratings · 52 reviews

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...more 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.(less)

Hardcover, 352 pages

Published September 7th 2010 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2010)

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Apr 25, 2013 Shauna is currently reading it

The subtitle should be noted: "Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power"

I'm only about 20 pages in, but so far the stories being told are devastating and, frankly, rage inducing. It's interesting seeing a focus on women in teh civil rights movement, and also cool learning the real back story of Rosa Parks. She wasn't just some woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus because she was tired, as they teach you i...more

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Mar 06, 2013 丽芳温 rated it 4 of 5 stars

An untold history with a gender perspective in the USA. Ranging from 1930s to 1960s, this book shows a Black women's history and Black women's movement (well before the Women's movement) by using court cases to present victims of rape and sexual assault. It offers a lens that is different from the traditional history, which of course silent so many other voices, and unveils the interlocking relationship of race, gender and politics.
For real, this book is different because it is not scared to te...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Erin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

According to the purchase receipt tucked into the epilogue, I have been reading this book for a little over six months. It’s not a long book, and it’s incredibly readable, but it is rough going. I do not mean to emphasize my own naivete about this time in America, but in a sense that is exactly what I intend - the fact that these things happened while my mother was alive is never not overwhelming to me, which speaks mainly to the deplorable way our country treated half its citizens and the effec...more According to the purchase receipt tucked into the epilogue, I have been reading this book for a little over six months. It’s not a long book, and it’s incredibly readable, but it is rough going. I do not mean to emphasize my own naivete about this time in America, but in a sense that is exactly what I intend - the fact that these things happened while my mother was alive is never not overwhelming to me, which speaks mainly to the deplorable way our country treated half its citizens and the effectiveness with which Danielle McGuire invokes that time.

This is not to say that you should not read this book, because the author’s mere suggestion that black women, at a time when they were the most powerless in society, were able to start turning the tide against injustice, violence and racism they experienced is ground-breaking and undeniably inspiring, and I would love nothing more than to see this perspective incorporated into popular American history. But I couldn’t help but constantly wonder how quickly people would resort to the animalism outlined in the book if they knew that, like in the South of the 1950’s, they could get away with it, and that was terrifying.

In detailing experiences of Southern black women leading up to the Civil Rights movement, Danielle McGuire accounts, often for the first time in great length, the brutal, unimaginable ordeals women endured at the hands of white men on a daily basis. She uses examples of the sexual subjugation of black women by white men, and the consequent abuse black men faced for daring to share space with white women, to illustrate the hidden genesis of the Civil Rights movement. Black women had been working together, organizing to protect themselves, fighting for their civil rights and their bodily autonomy, before Martin Luther King, Jr. was anointed as the leader of the nonviolent movement.

Rosa Park’s entrée into the civil rights movement actually occurred years earlier, as a young NAACP investigator rallying around black victims of sexual violence while publicizing sexual assault and rape cases committed by white men against black women that often went unreported or ended in acquittal. McGuire reveals how Parks, weary as a result of fighting for justice for black women, and not as a result of her “tired feet,” was protesting the systematic rape, assault, and lack of autonomy that black women experienced in the south when she refused to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus. As a result, she and fellow activist Jo Ann Robinson organized a bus boycott that was led predominantly by the black women who relied on the Montgomery bus system to transport them to their jobs as domestic workers in white neighborhoods. Therefore, the seminal moment in the Civil Rights movement was not only incited and led by women, but was an indirect result of the crippling oppression and violence black women experienced at the hands of white men and their refusal to remain powerless against it. Instead of being remembered as the radical leader of a movement she helped start, Rosa Parks became a passive symbol of virtuous black womanhood as Martin Luther King rose to become the public face of a struggle already being quietly and fiercely fought by women.

McGuire goes on to demonstrate the many ways in which white supremacy in the Jim Crow South was ultimately about sex, and who would retain control over women’s bodies. One of my favorite statements from the book, “By policing white women and black men’s sexual and marital choices while retaining power over black women’s bodies, white men retained their position at the top of the racial and sexual hierarchy,” suggests that at its basest, segregation, and the vehement, violent, ignorant refusal to integrate schools and other public places and act out with violence against those who threatened the power structure, was ultimately about a fear of the loss of control - mainly the loss of power and control over women. In sequential chapters, she relates the way the country’s response to cases of sexual violence and rape of black women mirrored the gradual end of de jure segregation and racism. It is a fascinating account of a history not often told and serves as an inspiring, if at times demoralizing, account of the trials black women in America have overcome and organized against. The women McGuire profiles were brave enough to tell their stories; we have to be brave enough to read them.(less)

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Jun 20, 2012 Carly rated it 5 of 5 stars

In her book, 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, Danielle L. McGuire re-tells the history of the Civil Rights Movement with a focus on the role of gender. Realizing the popularity of the male-centered canonical versions of African-American’s struggles which mainly focus on the struggle between black and white men (as in males), McGuire highlights the role of rape and sexual violenc...more In her book, 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, Danielle L. McGuire re-tells the history of the Civil Rights Movement with a focus on the role of gender. Realizing the popularity of the male-centered canonical versions of African-American’s struggles which mainly focus on the struggle between black and white men (as in males), McGuire highlights the role of rape and sexual violence as the primary/underlying mode of oppression. This focus sheds light on how not only race but also gender were fundamental in the struggle for equal rights: “If we understand the role rape and sexual violence played in African American’s daily lives and within the larger freedom struggle, we have to reinterpret, if not rewrite, the history of the civil rights movement. At the Dark End of the Street does both” (xx). In her brilliant storytelling manner, she achieves just this though describing several accounts of how women both catalyzed and propelled the Civil Rights Movement forward.
Using the Recy Taylor story as bookends to her text, McGuire highlights several other lesser-known female figures (in other words, important female figures that male-centered history tends to overshadow) like the bus boycott recall mastermind Jo Ann Robinson or Gertrude Perkins who was attacked on the street by police officers. While the book demonstrates how these women were vital in the movement’s progress, McGuire also offers a more in-depth and alternative view of more famous figures like Rosa Parks. McGuire’s attention to Park’s upbringing and circumstances surrounding her famous bus protest shed new light on how she was able to use her own power to defend her human rights. This new view also is divorced from the “King-centric” view that is so popular in most history textbooks. McGuire shows that it was women like Parks and Jo Ann Robinson who started the Montgomery Bus boycott, while male figures like Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. were more the voice to the people, rather than the brains behind and the founders of the boycott.
I found the author’s argument very convincing because of her excellent usage of primary resources and brilliant way of adapting the facts into a story-like document. Her character development, gathered by the facts contained in her research, formed a powerful new image of the atrocities and struggles African American women went though during the Civil Rights Movement. While I really enjoyed the segment on Rosa Parks, beginning on page 95, I began to question McGuire’s motives in depicting her famous bus incident as “unplanned.” McGuire asserts this despite the fact that the driver was the same man from 1944 who mistreated her, despite the fact that Parks was deeply involved in the nuts and bolts of many organizations looking for a poster woman for the Civil Rights Movement, and despite her being the most perfect candidate for the role. While I trust McGuire’s expertise in the matter, she does not explain why it is so important that Parks did the act without planning it. In my mind, it would have made just as big of an impact on the movement if it were planned, and also shown Park’s powerful character as one who seeks out justice from those who mistreat others (or herself in 1944).
Another section or point that was missing from the argument was that while McGuire asserts that the violence against African American women propelled African American men to protect them and by extension fight for their human rights, McGuire doesn’t discuss how this in turn makes women subordinate to men by them needing to be “protected.” If McGuire really wants to bring the gender argument home, I would think this point would at least be mentioned somewhere in the body of the text. Also, this thought is extremely heteronormative, and it would have been nice to see examples of other sexualities during the Civil Rights Movement in her book.
In sum, this new view of the Civil Rights Movement presented by McGuire is vital to the understanding of the movement. The tragic historical overshadowing of the women highlighted in her book is a crime! I hope that future generations not only read this book and realize the horrible male-centricity of canonical history, but then also take that knowledge and construct a more gender balanced history in new textbooks.
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Dec 30, 2011 Andre rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 in...more

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Oct 15, 2011 Andi Marquette rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-stuff

One of the things that many people don't realize is that Rosa Parks was a trained civil rights activist and social justice advocate. She didn't just decide one day not to move to the back of the bus because she was tired or her feet hurt or whatever. She knew damn well what she was doing, and she also knew that a woman of her background--upstanding citizen, from a good family, good reputation--meant that when she was arrested, her case had a better shot at helping reveal the terrible unfairness...more One of the things that many people don't realize is that Rosa Parks was a trained civil rights activist and social justice advocate. She didn't just decide one day not to move to the back of the bus because she was tired or her feet hurt or whatever. She knew damn well what she was doing, and she also knew that a woman of her background--upstanding citizen, from a good family, good reputation--meant that when she was arrested, her case had a better shot at helping reveal the terrible unfairness and dehumanization of the Jim Crow era. Had she been, for example, a "woman of ill repute", or perceived to be such, then chances were, 1950s white southern America would have claimed "she got what she deserved."

Readers will learn that about Parks in McGuire's fine narrative, and it's about time they did so. They will also learn that Parks was an investigator for the local branch (Montgomery, AL) of the NAACP. She would go and interview African American women who had been brutalized by white men -- something all too frequent during these years. McGuire uses several rape cases (white men raping African American women or teenaged girls) that triggered opposition from the NAACP, and helped push the civil rights era to the forefront of American politics. That's an aspect of the Civil Rights Movement you never hear--the role of sexual violence against African American women as a galvanizing force, and McDaniels makes a compelling and fascinating case for it.

I read this book earlier this year, about the time that many people were commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides through the South. I had the great and humbling experiencie of being able to hear Jim Zwerg speak about his experience on the Rides. He was one of the white people who joined African American colleagues on the Rides. He was terribly beaten in Montgomery, AL outside the bus station there, and he talked about how hateful and angry the white crowd was. But what was so moving and so amazing was that in spite of what had happened to him, and in spite of what the Riders went through, he would gladly do it again for the cause of social justice. Such a powerful and peaceful spirit emanated from Mr. Zwerg that to this day, thinking about hearing him speak and shaking his hand gives me goosebumps. I'd like to also mention that the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was part of the Birmingham contingent that rescued the Riders from the mob. Mr. Shuttlesworth died recently (as of my writing this--October 5, 2011), and that got me thinking once again about the Riders and what they were doing and what they stood for.

Reading McGuire's book really shed light on an aspect of the Civil Rights Movement for me that I hadn't fully considered, and because I was following the commemoration of the Freedom Rides, it provided another way for me to contextualize the era and to think about all the factors and people involved in the Movement. It also forces us to think about race, class, gender, and rape as an intrinsic part of the violence of that era. It's a brutal topic, but one that needs to be explored and recognized in order to come to a better understanding of an era that still influences American social and political history.(less)

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Feb 18, 2011 Drick rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, race-ethnic-studies

This the most important book on Civil rights history I have read in a long time. Danielle McGuire presents a revised history of the CR movement, placing African American women at the center of the story. Rosa Parks i re-presented as a courageous activist, who 10 years before the Montgomery (AL) bus boycott for which she became famous was doing investigative work for the NAACP of the brutal rape of Recy Taylor by four white men. McGuire's re-telling highlights the consistent sexual assault and ra...more

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Feb 18, 2011 Craig rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 20th-century-american-history

A different perspective on the Civil Rights Movement as McGuire focuses on many of the better-known incidents and leaders of the South from the 1940s to the 1970s (Rosa Parks, Little Rock Nine, Emmett Till, Freedom Summer, problems in Birmingham and Selma, etc.) and many of the lesser-known from the general perspective that the issue never really focused on was the sexual aggression against black women.

The book has some individuals whose stories need to be told, but I couldn't help feeling that...more

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Feb 18, 2011 Katrina rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Adults Interested in the Civil Rights Movement or History

Recommended to Katrina by: 2010 Literacy Award Committee

Shelves: adult, non-fiction

Did you know that in her early forties when she refused to give up her seat? Did you know that she was the local NAACP best investigator? Did you know that she was the driving force behind numerous sexual abuse cases throughout the south BEFORE the 1955 bus boycotts even began? In taking on these cases, Parks launched a movement that ultimately changed the world.

In this book, McGuire challenges the prevailing wisdom of a number of commonly accepted historical narratives: especially Rosa Parks's...more

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Sep 17, 2010 Jocelyn marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: history, highly-recommended, wl

from book copy:

"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 194...more

1 like · like · see review

Apr 03, 2013 Alessandra rated it 5 of 5 stars

Danielle McGuire’s 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 (2010) intends, at its heart, to unhinge the civil rights movement’s mainline narrative. By exploring the role of black women and interracial sexual violence, McGuire uncovers a hidden yet crucial facet of civil right’s history that has long been relegated to the dark recesses of public knowledge.

“The real story,” McGuire writes...more
Danielle McGuire’s 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 (2010) intends, at its heart, to unhinge the civil rights movement’s mainline narrative. By exploring the role of black women and interracial sexual violence, McGuire uncovers a hidden yet crucial facet of civil right’s history that has long been relegated to the dark recesses of public knowledge.

“The real story,” McGuire writes, “that the civil rights movement is also rooted in African Americans’ long struggle against sexual violence—has never been written” (xx). Her most powerful re-interpretation centers on her discussions of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. On the one hand, At the Dark End of the Street provides important pre-boycott background on Parks, illuminating how she had long been involved in black women’s issues prior to her stand on a Montgomery bus. McGuire also points to previous attempts by black women to seek legal redress after violence encounters with white men—which occurred long before the boycott fanned the flames of activism. “Frequently regarded as the spark plug of the modern civil rights movement,” McGuire says that boycott “was actually the end of a drive chain that ran back decades into black women’s activism” (51).

There is also an important legal history embedded within this work. Beginning with the 1944 Recy Taylor rape case, At the Dark End of the Street also examines the landmark decisions in the Betty Owens gang rape in 1959, the trial and conviction of Rosa Lee Coates’s perpetrator in1965, and the acquittal of Joan Little in 1975. Most of these cases, in McGuire’s view, commanded national attention and were essential organizing engines for black activists and white supremacists alike. These cases and the mass mobilizations that they often incited, McGuire explains, speak to “the power of sexual stories to mobilize communities and build coalitions” (47).

McGuire also illuminates how the debate over Jim Crow was fought with deeply gendered and sexualized language. On the one hand, At the Dark End of the Street examines how boycott organizers relied on female “politics of respectability” when challenging the Southern status quo. Meanwhile, white supremacists would use the common troupe of the black “jezebel” in an attempt to undermine black victims of rape, while also underscoring the protection of “white womanhood” vis a vis segregation. Ultimately, McGuire’s language analyses expertly emphasize how sex, race, and gender were inextricably linked within the civil rights movement.

I did, however, question her decision to largely neglect the North. While it is apparent that this study warrants a Southern focus, McGuire could’ve gestured to similar events in the North and West. In my view, that would only strengthen her desire to make this a national narrative. Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008) speaks to the general neglect of the North within civil rights narratives—a neglect that McGuire is also guilty of. This quibble, however, should not detract from the significance and nuance of her civil rights study.
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Jun 20, 2011 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, non-fiction

One of the books I'm most glad to have found this year. This book was extremely difficult to read in parts; it needs a strong trigger warning for graphic discussion of rape and the way it was an explicit tool of the anti-rights white South in the 1960s and 1970s. It deserves five stars and more for that discussion, and for the way it uncovers and retells this story, and for the way it reclaims Rosa Parks' activist history from the specter of the mild, tired lady with sore feet whom we're told ab...more

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Apr 30, 2012 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars

I didn't learn much of this in or outside of school, even though I thought I was pretty on the mark and up with what went down. I'm not surprised by what I read. That in and of itself is telling, for me at least. If you want to read a book about what White men CHOSE to do to Black women -to hurt and maim hurt and maim them from the early days of the 20th century civil rights movement and how many women nevertheless came forward and came forward to tell their stories but no one listened, and how...more I didn't learn much of this in or outside of school, even though I thought I was pretty on the mark and up with what went down. I'm not surprised by what I read. That in and of itself is telling, for me at least. If you want to read a book about what White men CHOSE to do to Black women -to hurt and maim hurt and maim them from the early days of the 20th century civil rights movement and how many women nevertheless came forward and came forward to tell their stories but no one listened, and how they were brutalized and raped and brutalized and whipped and beaten, standing up to their perpetrators, and how "the system" that protected these "things" who raped their bodies and souls (I won't dignify these "things" by calling them men, and women too ), please read this book. If you want to learn many new truths about the war of white on black, then read this book. If you read this book and your take on it is like mine, then I say, I'm sure that what is described in the book continues today. I'm not sure how to review this book, but there won't be spoiler. I need some time to decide if I, as a self-described liberal left leaning white woman have the right to write about what I will never experience in my life. I try, but I can't begin to understand what these courageous women and generations of women before them suffered through. They never gave up standing up for themselves and they never lost their dignity. Review and analysis of books shouldn't be oaky or not okay based on the color of one's skin. That said, I feel so dirty after reading this book - connected to those "things" who never should have been given lungs to breathe with in the first place, that I need to think a lot before I say much more. And if anyone thinks that the civil rights movement marched on mostly because of courageous men, think again. Black men and women worked together in many instances. And oh how they worked! Black men held the power though, and theirs were the faces in the press. I learned while reading this book that Black women played a much larger and critical role in things than I knew at least. Once again, I'm not surprised. In many ways , Black women were some of the earliest feminists of our times, before the outcries and taking to the streets by women in the 1960s and 70s. Black men in this "war" seem to have received all the glory (and yes, they deserved glory), but did Black women get anything like recognition for their valor? No. Even Rosa Parks, excuse the expression, was "white-washed" in the history books from which I was taught. This wasn't meant to be a rant, but after reading this book I've got electricity and shame buzzing under my skin. Enough.(less)

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Jan 03, 2013 Larry rated it 4 of 5 stars

Imagine being a woman. A woman with 23 children. Now imagine that 20 of those children are the result of being raped. Imagine that your daughter is so fearful of being attacked, too, that she routinely carries a pistol with her when she works outside. Imagine further that her daughter, your granddaughter, is arrested, beaten bloody and naked by law enforcement for peaceably protesting that culture of violence. Such has been the life of the Southern black women, and this book does a remarkable jo...more

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May 08, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

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-...more 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.(less)

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Nov 24, 2012 Chris Lake rated it 4 of 5 stars

When I was taught about Rosa Parks and her contribution to the Montgomery bus boycott, I was taught that Parks was a quiet old women who just did not want to give up her seat. This book has taught me that the truth is much more complicated, and much more interesting. Rosa Parks was not some quiet old women, she had long been an activist in the civil rights movement. In particular, she went all over Alabama and documented the rapes, and assaults of white men on black women. This was one thing tha...more

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Oct 22, 2012 Janastasia Whydra rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: black, essays, non-fiction, political, voice-from-the-margins, women, must-buy-for-bookshelf, historical

Danielle L. McGuire's 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 is the book we should have read for History class in high school rather than the "government-approved-summary-of-the-Civil-Rights-movement-in-one-chapter" history textbooks. To be honest, I was one of those students who was taught Roda Parks was just a little old lady who sat down in a seat at the front of the bus and was to...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Bill DeGenaro rated it 4 of 5 stars

Outstanding history of the Civil Rights movement, with an emphasis on the role(s) that sexual violence played in prompting African-American women to mobilize for change. Years before the Montgomery bus boycott, buses had become a flashpoint for groups like the NAACP because their drivers were frequently thug who would attack black women--especially those who didn't immediately obey their orders. White-on-black rape and the threat of rape were ubiquitous in the segregated south. McGuire tells the...more

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Apr 28, 2012 Craig Werner rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: african-american, friends-books, history

One of the two or three most important books about the Civil Rights Movement. Reconsidering the (overly and deceptively) familiar story, At the Dark End of the Street places the experience of African American community at the center of the narrative to show that sexual violence against black women was as important as the battles for equal rights and desegregation which have received the lion's share of attention from historians. McGuire, who writes beautifully, redefines our understanding of maj...more

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Feb 11, 2013 Anne Kabel rated it 4 of 5 stars

A painful, disturbing book to read but still an important one to read.

the author shows how strong African American were in coming forward with their complaints of rape, knowing that most likely the rapists would never be arrested, let alone brought to trial. And if that ever did happen, would they be convicted?

The real jewel in this book is learning how key women were in the early days of the civil rights movement, in particular the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It would probably have never happened w...more

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May 25, 2011 Marian rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: check-this-out

A major contribution to setting the record straight about the late Mrs. Rosa McCauley Parks and now 93 year old sexual assault survivor Mrs. RECY TAYLOR; telling the truth - in published form - about Black women's lives and about our leadership, both private & public, here in the United States, in the European slaveholding, Black-baby-breeding & -selling colonies which preceded the USA, and Black women's and girls' lives throughout the Americas.

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Mar 29, 2011 Linda Robinson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Enlightening, crisp, eye-opening, infuriating, with superb research behind it, and a mandate to rewrite history in front. I've asked many friends to describe the story of Rosa Parks, and not one of them knew she was a committed activist before the Montgomery bus boycott. It's fascinating that women's history is rising to the top quickly after so many centuries of our stories being squashed at the bottom of the literature. Thanks to McGuire, and the women she writes about, we are on the path of e...more

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Apr 11, 2011 J. Sanders rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Danielle McGuire’s book is a revelation and fills in much needed gaps in the history of the Civil Rights movement. She pulls women like Joanne Little and Recy Taylor from the margins and obscurity of Civil Rights history and explains that their courage to give their testimonies about sexual violence waged against them, they helped launch a movement of protecting black womanhood. With wonderful details about the armed meetings of Rosa Parks’ husband and other men before the birth of the Montgomer...more

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Jul 01, 2011 Nancy rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is an academic book, but very readable. It's truly brilliant and ground breaking. She retells the history of the civil rights movement with sexual violence against Black women at the center. It turns out there is a lot of untold history of activism against the rape of Black women, and it makes the entire rest of the history of civil rights activism look different.

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Nov 10, 2011 Victoria Law rated it 3 of 5 stars

Written in a conversational tone accessible to non-academics, I think that everyone who is concerned about either racial justice/anti-racism or anti-rape work should read this. (Hell, everyone should read this, but people working in those two areas would really benefit from seeing how the two intersect to create an invisible population and struggle)

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Nov 08, 2010 Zach rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: feminism-gender, history, race

This is a very important book. It is also an extremely depressing and upsetting book, but they go hand in hand, right? In reexamining the civil rights movement through the lens of sexual abuse of black women by white men in the South, McGuire challenges the prevailing wisdom of a number of commonly accepted historical narratives: the growth of the CRM at large and especially Rosa Parks's role, the gendered violence of the white backlash, and the courageous resistance of black women in the Jim Cr...more

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Jan 11, 2013 Jordan rated it 5 of 5 stars

A fast moving, gut-wrenching account of the civil rights movement that tears away at the nice and neat retelling you find in your average history books. I'm not sure I've ever learned so much from one book and I know I will never think of the civil rights movement in the same way again. I recommend this book to everyone.

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Apr 27, 2012 Joy Weese Moll rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: african-american, diversity-book-club

At the Dark End of the Street provided great discussion material for the Diversity Book Club last night. We all learned something, whether we were old enough to have read about the Civil Rights Movement in the daily newspapers or young enough to have learned about it in history class.

More on my blog: Book Review: At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle L. McGuire

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Mar 27, 2013 Susan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Completely changed the way I looked at women and civil rights movement. Black women risked everything, including their bodily integrity, in the fight for racial equality. I had to frequently pause and gather myself because as a woman, some parts were hard to read. This book challenged everything I had previously thought about civil rights movement.

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Apr 30, 2013 Maya Frank-Levine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Provides new context for familiar historical events and spotlighting occurrences that had been mostly forgotten in the popular retelling of the Civil Rights movement. McGuire doesn't stint on the horror of the cases she describes, but rather than a downtrodden group of victims, she portrays a community spurred to action.

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About Danielle L. McGuire

Danielle McGuire is a writer and historian who is interested in the African American freedom struggle. She teaches history at Wayne State University in Detroit. She lives with her husband and two children.

More about Danielle L. McGuire...

Books by Danielle L. McGuire

Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement

Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to Present

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“Judge Carter sat in stony silence, completely unmoved. At the end of the trial, he pronounced King guilty of conspiracy to violate the 1921 law and ordered him to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine or serve a year at hard labor. Like Judge Carter, the national newspaper and magazine reporters waiting outside for the ruling ignored the black women's testimonies that detailed decades of mistreatment and denied King's leadership in the boycott. Instead, the media turned King into an apostle of civil rights.” — 1 person liked it

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