WUNRN
USA - BLACK WOMEN, RAPE &
RESISTANCE - HISTORY - BOOK
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http://atthedarkendofthestreet.com/the-book/
The Book
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.