In 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, historian Danielle L. McGuire uncovers the untold history of many Black female civil rights activists. McGuire’s book is meant to serve as a correction to popular accounts of the civil rights era. While the movement has frequently been associated with its male leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., McGuire argues that Black women have always been at the forefront of anti-racist activism. Civil rights campaigns often targeted sexual violence, and McGuire argues that a central goal of the civil rights movement has always been the protection of Black women’s bodily autonomy.

Published in 2010, At the Dark End of the Street won the 2011 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, which is awarded to outstanding debut works of American history, and the 2011 Lillian Smith Book Award, which celebrates outstanding works focusing on social justice in the American South.

This study guide refers to the e-book edition of At the Dark End of the Street published by the Knopf Doubleday in 2010.

Content Warning: The source material and this study guide discuss rape and anti-Black racism.

Summary

In the Prologue and Chapter 1, McGuire focuses on the sexual assault of Recy Taylor, a young Black woman from Alabama. In 1944, the 24-year-old Taylor was abducted and raped by six white men in Abbeville, Alabama. Though Taylor was able to identify one of the men, a grand jury refused to issue any indictments against her rapists. Rosa Parks, then an investigator for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), traveled to Abbeville to document Taylor’s abuse and failure to receive justice. Parks then worked with numerous activist organizations to launch a national campaign to support Taylor. Though the campaign forced the governor of Alabama to reopen the investigation, no charges were ever filed.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Rosa Parks and her role in the Montgomery bus boycott. In Montgomery, Alabama, segregated bus lines were a hotly contested issue. Black female riders were frequently subjected to physical and verbal abuse, and riders who refused to obey bus drivers were sometimes violently attacked. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused bus driver James F. Blake’s order to relinquish her seat. Parks’s subsequent arrest and trial sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, a yearlong campaign to end segregation on Montgomery’s buses. McGuire argues that Parks’s protest must be understood in the context of her long engagement with anti-racist activism, including her campaign to support Recy Taylor. McGuire also focuses on the role that Black women like Jo Ann Robinson played in keeping the boycott alive.

Despite the success of civil rights campaigns like the Montgomery bus boycott, the second half of the 1950s was marred by a white supremacist backlash against integration. Chapter 4 describes how segregationists formed organizations such as White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan in response to Black people’s increasing social equality. These groups used sexual violence to intimidate Black people into forgoing their newly earned rights. In Chapters 5 and 6, McGuire describes some of the Black women who continued to protest sexual violence despite increasing white supremacist violence. These women include Betty Jean Owens, who successfully brought her rapists to trial, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who testified about her sexual assault at the Democratic National Convention.

In the final chapters of At the Dark End of the Street, McGuire explores the legacies of the civil rights movement. Chapter 7 explores how segregationists increasingly relied on racist fears about interracial sex as Black people gained more social equality. Many segregationists stirred up paranoia among Southern white people by claiming that Black people only wanted social equality to gain sexual access to white women. The book Sex and Civil Rights was published to discredit the Selma march, using doctored photos to claim that the protestors engaged in interracial orgies. Chapter 8 focuses on the Joan Little trial to explore the lasting effects of the civil rights movement. In the trial, Little successfully argued that she killed her white jailer in self-defense. Some activists saw Little’s acquittal as proof the South was moving past its racist past.