At the Dark End of the Street

Starred review from July 12, 2010
McGuire's "new history" shines fresh light upon the germinal role of black women in the birth and development of the civil rights movement. "For decades," she writes, "the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Parks's spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men." McGuire, assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, goes behind that story to tell of black women's struggles against abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. She foregrounds black women's experiences of "verbal, physical, and sexual abuse" as prime movers of the grassroots movement. From the rape of Recy Taylor (1944) to the rape of Joan Little (1975), McGuire restores to memory the courageous black women who dared seek legal remedy, when black women and their families faced particular hazards for doing so. McGuire brings the reader through a dark time via a painful but somehow gratifying passage in this compelling, carefully documented work.

September 15, 2010
Long before Rosa Parks became famous for resisting Jim Crow laws, she was engaged in advocating for social justice for black women who were the victims of sexual violence at the hands of white men. Historian McGuire aims to rewrite the history of the civil rights movement by highlighting sexual violence in the broader context of racial injustice and the fight for freedom. Parks worked as an investigator for the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama, specializing in cases involving black women who had been sexually assaulted by white mencases that often went untried and were the political opposite of the allegations of black men raping white women ending in summary lynching with or without trials. McGuire traces the history of several rape cases that triggered vehement resistance by the NAACP and other groups, including the 1975 trial of Joan Little, who killed a white jailer who sexually assaulted her. Despite the long tradition of dismissing charges brought by blacks against whites, several of the cases ended in convictions, as black women asserted their right to be treated justly.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)