Danielle McGuire, PhD, is an award-winning Civil Rights historian, public speaker and author of 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 (Knopf). She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has appeared on PBS, CNN, MSNBC, Headline News, National Public Radio, and BookTV. Her popular essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Detroit Free Press, Bridge Magazine, Washington Post, Huffington Post and CNN.com. She serves as a consultant on documentary films such as The Rape of Recy Taylor and You Belong to Me: The Ruby McCollum Story. She also helps curate educational historical tours and civil rights-related curricula for secondary schools and serves on the advisory board of History Studio. She is currently at work on a book about police violence in Detroit in 1967, to be published by Knopf.

Current Project:
Murder in the Motor City: The 1967 Detroit Riot and American Injustice

The story of the Algiers Motel murders and subsequent trials, the main narrative thread of Murder in the Motor City, captures, in its tragic horror, the often hidden infrastructure of northern racism and white supremacy. From rabid residential segregation and job discrimination to racialized and sexual violence to ecumenic and educational disparities and the everyday injustices and biased sentencing in the judicial system, racial inequality and segregation in Detroit was every bit as virulent as it was in the South. Maybe even worse.
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Blog

A police killing. A coverup. And a history of silence.

A police killing. A coverup. And a history of silence.

No headstone marks William “Billy” Dalton’s gravesite. His childhood home on Fernwood Street, once part of a vibrant, working-class Black neighborhood, was razed to build the Jeffries Freeway. The former parking lot of Wild’s Cleaner’s on the corner of Grand River and Edmonton, where Detroit Police officer Ronald F. Karchefski shot and killed the 19-year-old

Happy 100th Birthday, Recy Taylor!
Happy 100th Birthday, Recy Taylor!

Happy 100th Birthday, Recy Taylor! Recy Taylor was born on New Year’s Eve in 1919, a crucible of violence & resistance. It was the year of the “Red Summer” when white terrorists rampaged through black towns and across the country in an orgy of violence.  WEB DuBois said “We return from fighting. We return fighting.”

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Letters for Betty Jean Owens
Letters for Betty Jean Owens

Last night I spoke with Betty Jean Owens’s grandson, Amonte Martin. He and I talked over the past decade–first when my Journal of American History article came out and since my book was released in 2010. We chatted about history, family and especially the health and well-being of his grandmother, Betty Jean Owens, who was

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Landmark 1959 rape case in Tallahassee, Florida was central to the Civil Rights Movement
Landmark 1959 rape case in Tallahassee, Florida was central to the Civil Rights Movement

In May 1959, four white men kidnapped and raped an African American college student in Tallahassee Florida.  When her classmates at Florida A & M University found out about what happened, they mobilized and demanded justice. Their public protests helped force the local prosecutor to charge the assailants with rape and bring them to trial.

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Reviews

Praise for Danielle McGuire's most recent book: At the Dark End of the Street

McGuire’s provocative narrative forces readers to rethink what they know about that pivotal moment in U.S. history: its time frame, its actors, its legacy.

Ms. Magazine
Ms. Magazine

At the Dark End of the Street is one of those rare studies that makes a well-known story seem startlingly new. Anyone who thinks he knows the history of the modern civil rights movement needs to read this terrifying, illuminating book.

Kevin Boyle
Kevin BoyleNational Book Award-winner for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age

Following the lead of pioneers like Darlene Clark Hine, Danielle McGuire details the all too ignored tactic of rape of black women in the everyday practice of southern white supremacy. Just as important, she plots resistance against this outrage as an integral facet of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This book is as essential as its history is infuriating.

Nell Irvin Painter
Nell Irvin Painterauthor of The History of White People

McGuire’s “new history” shines fresh light upon the germinal role of black women in the birth and development of the civil rights movement.

Publisher’s Weekly
Publisher's Weekly

Just when we thought there couldn’t possibly be anything left to uncover about the civil rights movement, Danielle McGuire finds a new facet of that endlessly prismatic struggle at the core of our national identity. By reinterpreting black liberation through the lens of organized resistance to white male sexual aggression against African-American women, McGuire ingeniously upends the white race’s ultimate rationale for its violent subjugation of blacks—imputed black male sexual aggression against white women. It is an original premise, and At the Dark End of the Street delivers on it with scholarly authority and narrative polish.

Diane McWhorter
Diane McWhorterPulitzer Prize Winner for Carry Me Home: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

This gripping story changes the history books, giving us a revised Rosa Parks and a new civil rights story. You can’t write a general U.S. history without altering crucial sentences because of McGuire’s work. Masterfully narrated, At the Dark End of the Street presents a deep civil rights movement with women at the center, a narrative as poignant, painful and complicated as our own lives.

Timothy B. Tyson
Timothy B. TysonNational Book Award Finalist for Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

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