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A review by erincampbell87
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
5.0
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.
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.