Danielle McGuire

Danielle McGuire, PhD, is an award-winning 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), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award. She is the recipient of the Lerner Scott Prize for best dissertation in women’s history. Her Journal of American History article, “It was Like We Were All Raped: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization and the African American Freedom Struggle,” won the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best essay in southern women’s history and was reprinted in the Best Essays in American History. She is the editor with John Dittmer of Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement; and wrote the foreword for John Hersey’s The Algiers Motel Incident. Her published essays also appear in Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies; U.S Women’s History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood; Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South Reconstruction to the Present; and Bayard Rustin: a Legacy of Protest and Politics.

 

McGuire is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has appeared on PBS, CNN, MSNBC, Headline News, National Public Radio, BookTV, and dozens of local television and radio stations throughout the United States. 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 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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Recent Publications & Media Appearances

Book Launch Party! Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies
Book Launch Party! Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies

Join us for the party! I am still working on my book about the 1967 Algiers Motel murders in Detroit.  But you can hear a sneak peak of my findings at the launch party for a new book on the 1967 Detroit uprising. This collection of essays investigates the origins and aftermaths of the 1967 Detroit

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Rosa Parks and SNCC Freedom Singers: Warriors for freedom and human rights
Rosa Parks and SNCC Freedom Singers: Warriors for freedom and human rights

This was probably one of the highlights of my career (so far). In this panel put together by the Central Ohio Transit Center, I joined a conversation with SNCC Freedom Singers Charles Neblett, Rutha Harris, and Betty Mae Fykes about the “power of one.” The first part of the video features the SNCC Freedom Singers

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Interview: Rape of Recy Taylor was a catalyst for Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955
Interview: Rape of Recy Taylor was a catalyst for Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955

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

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Podcast: The Rape of Recy Taylor on Rock the Schools with Citizen Stewart
Podcast: The Rape of Recy Taylor on Rock the Schools with Citizen Stewart

Episode 83 I Black History Month – “At The Dark End Of The Street” with Danielle McGuire and Beth Hubbard Author of “At The Dark End Of The Street” Danielle McGuire, and Producer of “The Rape of Recy Taylor” Beth Hubbard, provide a powerful history lesson in honor of Black History month by recognizing the

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