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

Groundbreaking, controversial, and courageous, here is the story of Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor—a story that reinterprets the history of America's civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed against black women by white men. 

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--Rosa Parks--to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women and added fire to the growing call for change. 

• City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Justice, Power, and Politics)
• A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
• The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
• The Blood of Emmett Till
• From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
• Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early ... and the University of North Carolina Press)
• White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Modern America)
• Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Justice, Power, and Politics)
• Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media