At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance

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.

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Praise for At the Dark End of the Street

In this compelling book, Danielle L. McGuire excavates a tragic hidden legacy of slavery in the United States: the rape and sexual exploitation of thousands of black females (both women and girls) from the antebellum period to the present…

Margaret Russell, California Lawyer Magazine

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, National Book Award Finalist for Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

A young scholar unearths some hidden history about women in the civil rights movement—then finds it unexpectedly echoed in her own life.

Bliss Broyard, ELLE 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, National 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, author 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

Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement

In his seminal article “Freedom Then, Freedom Now,” renowned civil rights historian Steven F. Lawson described his vision for the future study of the civil rights movement. Lawson called for a deeper examination of the social, economic, and political factors that influenced the movement’s development and growth. He urged his fellow scholars to connect the “local with the national, the political with the social,” and to investigate the ideological origins of the civil rights movement, its internal dynamics, the role of women, and the significance of gender and sexuality.

In Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, editors Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer follow Lawson’s example, bringing together the best new scholarship on the modern civil rights movement. The work expands our understanding of the movement by engaging issues of local and national politics, gender and race relations, family, community, and sexuality. The volume addresses cultural, legal, and social developments and also investigates the roots of the movement. Each essay highlights important moments in the history of the struggle, from the impact of the Young Women’s Christian Association on integration to the use of the arts as a form of activism. Freedom Rights not only answers Lawson’s call for a more dynamic, interactive history of the civil rights movement, but it also helps redefine the field.

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Praise for Freedom Rights

Freedom Rights not only reconceptualizes the civil rights movement but also suggests a broader framework for understanding the global history of freedom struggles. This collection of outstanding new scholarship sheds light on continuing evolution of innovative American grassroots activism within a constantly changing national and international context. Rather than presenting narrowly-conceived narratives of modern American civil rights reform, these articles illuminate the transcendent ideals and transformative strategies emanating from a global freedom struggle affecting the majority of humanity.

Clayborne Carson, Professor & Director, Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

[...] the insightful, compelling, and readable quality of many of the chapters makes Freedom Rights worthy of attention for historians of the 20th-century United States, graduate students, and perhaps even advanced undergraduates.

The Journal of African American History

Students, teachers, researchers, and a general audience will find this volume a lively, engaging, readable, and informative introduction to what civil rights scholarship looks like today and where it is headed in the future.

Journal of American History

These valuable essays ... exhibit unique and exciting trends within civil rights historiography.

North Carolina Historical Review

Freedom Rights offers readers significant new perspectives on the civil rights movement's cultural and family politics, expands our understanding of its organizational bases, incorporates gender as a vital tool of analysis rather than as contribution history, and clarifies the evolution of strategies for undermining black political power in the years since. Its dynamic arguments establish new standards in the field that will impact scholarly debates for years to come.

Katherine Mellen Charron, Author of Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark

Perhaps the collection's greatest strength is that it takes moments, people, and concepts that could be merely footnotes and reasons persuasively that those topics deserve much more attention from scholars.

H-Net Reviews

Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies

In the summer of 1967, Detroit experienced one of the worst racially charged civil disturbances in United States history. Years of frustration generated by entrenched and institutionalized racism boiled over late on a hot July night. In an event that has been called a “riot,” “rebellion,” “uprising,” and “insurrection,” thousands of African Americans took to the street for several days of looting, arson, and gunfire. Law enforcement was overwhelmed, and it wasn’t until battle-tested federal troops arrived that the city returned to some semblance of normalcy. Fifty years later, native Detroiters cite this event as pivotal in the city’s history, yet few completely understand what happened, why it happened, or how it continues to affect the city today. Discussions of the events are often rife with misinformation and myths, and seldom take place across racial lines. It is editor Joel Stone’s intention with Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies to draw memories, facts, and analysis together to create a broader context for these conversations.

Praise for Detroit 1967

As a young African American Detroit Police officer in 1967, I witnessed the cruelty of rogue, racist police officers who had very little respect for human life. In fact, I almost lost my life to two racist white police officers who shot at me as I returned to my apartment from a long tour of duty. It's frightening that fifty years later we are still dealing with the same fears.

Isaiah McKinnon, associate professor of education, University of Detroit Mercy. Retired deputy mayor and retired chief of police of the city of Detroit

Detroit 1967 provides invaluable historical context for the events that exploded on July 23, 1967. It is a thoroughly researched and well-written overview of the history of race relations in the city from its founding in 1701 to today and a ‘must-read’ for all who care about Detroit and its future.

Shirley Stancato, president and CEO, New Detroit Inc.

This collection of essays provides a very informative racial history of Detroit, ranging from slavery to the Underground Railroad, to the 1943 riot, to deindustrialization. This book is a welcome addition to the race relations literature on Detroit.

Joe T. Darden, professor of urban geography, Michigan State University

U.S. Women’s History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood

In the 1970s, feminist slogans proclaimed “Sisterhood is powerful,” and women’s historians searched through the historical archives to recover stories of solidarity and sisterhood. However, as feminist scholars have started taking a more intersectional approach—acknowledging that no woman is simply defined by her gender and that affiliations like race, class, and sexual identity are often equally powerful—women’s historians have begun to offer more varied and nuanced narratives.The ten original essays in U.S. Women’s History represent a cross-section of current research in the field. Including work from both emerging and established scholars, this collection employs innovative approaches to study both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. Some essays uncover little-known aspects of women’s history, while others offer a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches.

Praise for U.S. Women's History

This indispensable volume collects the most current scholarship on gender and U.S. history.  The essays are a testament to the vibrancy of the field of women's history and illustrate the range of methodological and theoretical innovations that continue to drive the field.

Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery

This is women’s history at its finest. With essays on diverse women, the anthology at once builds upon generations of scholarship as it pushes the field in exciting new directions

Michele Mitchell, Professor of History, New York University

Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to Present

Other Souths collects fifteen innovative essays that place issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality at the center of the narrative of southern history. Using a range of methodologies and approaches, contributing historians provide a fresh perspective to key events and move long-overlooked episodes into prominence.Pippa Holloway edited the volume using a chronological and event-driven framework with which many students and teachers will be familiar. The book covers well-recognized topics in American history: wars, reform efforts, social movements, and political milestones. Cultural topics are considered as well, including the development of consumer capitalism, the history of rock and roll, and the history of sport. The focus and organization of the essays underscore the value of southern history to the larger national narrative.

Praise for Other Souths

This splendid collection captures the South's complex history from Reconstruction to the present. Incorporating race, class, and gender; sexuality, morality, and popular culture; immigration, environmentalism, and peace politics, Other Souths illuminates traditional issues from new and compelling perspectives.

Nancy A. Hewitt, Author of Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida

A useful teaching text and important intellectual piece. . . . From the public political acts of lowcountry freedwomen to the discovery of the real John Henry, the interrogation of suspected lesbian educators, and the Latinization of the southern landscape, Other Souths uncovers the multiple layers of southern politics, rendering obsolete the divide between public and private or between grassroots politics and more formal electoral politics. In the process, the collection offers the possibilities of comparing big questions across time and place.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Other Souths is an insightful exploration of southern history that serves as both an incredibly helpful companion to existing scholarship and an innovative collection of essays that ask us to reconsider the southern past from new and alternative perspectives. By employing emerging areas of study like environmental policy and urban planning and uncovering obscured histories of the southern past, this collection demonstrates the exciting potential of what lies ahead for the study of the U.S. South.

Arkansas Review

This is one of the most creative and provocative southern history anthologies ever published. By bringing together the stories of former slaves, Syrian immigrants, World War I draft resisters, environmentalists, opponents of university football, civil rights activists, and New South conservatives (among others), Other Souths challenges almost every accepted truism about postbellum southern society. This book is appropriate for both scholarly and general audiences and will be an indispensable addition to courses in southern history, culture, and social change. Other Souths will set the standard in this field for years to come.

Paul Ortiz, Author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920

The volume prompts a rethinking of the place of the modern South in the nation in a way that the individual articles, when they first appeared, did not. . . . As a whole, the collection confirms that the South has been and remains distinctive in its reactions to federal law but also that southerners have found themselves deeply and inextricably bound to national issues of economic development, social change, and demographic shifts.

Journal of Southern History

Other Recent Published Work

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

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

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

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