Listen to an interview between Danielle McGuire and Marty Moss-Coane on WHYY in Philadelphia (2010)
You know one story about Rosa Parks, but not this one: The woman who gained worldwide fame when she “refused to give up her seat” on a Montgomery bus was also a radical activist and a top NAACP investigator into the routine and ritual rape of black women by white men in the mid-1940s. Rosa Parks’ work on behalf of brutalized black women, like Recy Taylor, who was assaulted in Alabama in 1944, was part of and helped catalyze one of the more important, but wholly overlooked, building blocks for the American Civil Rights movement. That story is central to DANIELLE McGUIRE’s, 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.