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

Abstract

The case for a long civil rights movement could use the history of what Danielle L. McGuire calls the crusade for black women's dignity. McGuire's passionate, prize-winning book At the Dark End of the Street broadens the mid-twentieth-century civil rights narrative by anchoring the freedom struggle in “a decades-long struggle to protect black women … from sexualized violence and rape” (p. xvii). This focus represents a significant departure from civil rights orthodoxy; McGuire is correct to observe that “analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement, which present it as a struggle between black and white men” (p. xix). Civil rights historians find political meaning and causal power in violence against black males, such as the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, but have neglected violence directed at black women and girls. The result, according to McGuire, has blinded us to the ways “sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy” (ibid.). Fannie Lou Hamer said it best: “A black woman's body was never hers alone” (p. xviii).