Summary: Even in civil rights history, the role of women, especially their work to end sexualized violence, has been under-appreciated.
I have owned At the Dark End of the Street for years, and I have not picked it up because I knew that it would be a difficult book to read. However, taking the concept of trigger warnings seriously, this is a book that discusses sexual violence and rape frequently. It is not described luridly, but in discussing the reality of the use of rape as a form of terrorism and an expression of white supremacy (in the sense of racial superiority), sexual violence is described regularly throughout the book. But as I continue to interact with people about race and historical issues, I am convinced that these difficult topics have to be discussed because the lack of discussion is part of what whitewashes history.
At the Dark End of the Street is a reworking of Danielle McGuire’s dissertation. The broad thesis is that the civil rights movement has suppressed or at least under-appreciated the role of women organizing against sexual violence.
“Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and many other places had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood. And yet analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement…”
Many people know Rosa Park’s work for the NAACP in the 1940s and 50s before the Montgomery Bus Boycott. And many people may be aware that one of the early roles of Rosa Parks as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP was to investigate cases of rape as terrorism. In 1944, Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old woman, married, with a young daughter, was kidnapped while walking home from church. Four men repeatedly raped her. Taylor, and a friend who was walking with her, were able to identify the car and the men. The men admitted to “picking up” Taylor. Still, because of the ways that Black women were stereotyped as universally sexually immoral, their claim that they had paid her for sex was accepted by the police. Because of how badly beaten Recy Taylor was, and the work of Rosa Parks and others in publicizing the case nationally, a grand jury was convened. The grand jury heard Recy Taylor’s testimony and the men’s admissions but refused to indict them. (Having picked up At the Dark End of the Street while I was reading The Bill of Rights Primer, the discussion by Adams and Amir about the grand jury as a means of holding the government accountable for abuse was prescient. The problem with the system of grand juries is that they do not work if there is widespread discrimination within the community.)
Eventually, a second grand jury was held because of national outcry, and the grand jury refused to indict the men again. But this national campaign was only the start of women in the Montgomery area resisting sexual violence. That sexual violence was not just random men terrorizing women but also official actors using sexual violence as part of their official role. Police in Montgomery (and throughout the south) regularly raped Black women, making it hard for the Black community to have anyone to turn to. And the buses were not an incidental target for a boycott. The bus drivers exposed themselves to black women as a form of sexual harassment. They were legally authorized to carry guns and use them with little accountability. There were multiple cases of bus drivers killing passengers in Montgomery (and around the south). And again, bus drivers regularly called the police to remove black passengers. There were multiple cases of police raping the women who were removed as a form of intimidation, harassment, and community terrorism.
Martin Luther King Jr was the dominant public figure in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and played an important role. But the organizational work of the boycott (publicizing it, setting up alternate transportation systems, and the many of the actual drivers in those alternate systems) were primarily women.
“The enormous spotlight that focused on King, combined with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid the women’s long struggle in the dimly lit background, obscuring the origins of the MIA and erasing women from the movement. For decades, the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Parks’s spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men like Fred Gray, Martin Luther King, Jr., E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy. While these men had a major impact on the emerging protest movement, it was black women’s decade-long struggle against mistreatment and abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. Without an appreciation for the particular predicaments of black women in the Jim Crow South, it is nearly impossible to understand why thousands of working-class and hundreds of middle-class black women chose to walk rather than ride the bus for 381 days.
One of the cultural differences of the 1940s and 50s that many today may not realize is the importance of clubs and community organizations. The population of Montgomery in the 1950s was a bit over 100,000, with 40% of the population being Black. More than 40,000 Black residents organized and participated in nearly 60 churches and more than 50 other formal clubs and neighborhood organizations. These included traditional block clubs, national or regional fraternities and sororities, trade organizations, civil rights groups like the NAACP, and arts organizations. Martin Luther King is credited with leadership, but the Women’s Political Council and its president Jo Ann Robinson organized the boycott. Of course, the boycott could not have worked without the participation of many clubs and community organizations throughout the city. But it also would not have happened without the decades of previous organizing and work by women like Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson. They had a long history of resisting sexualized violence against Black women. (For a second book that supports this broader thesis, read A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis.)
At the Dark End of the Street uses Montgomery as a starting point but continues retelling the story of Freedom Summer and the Selma votings rights protests and other Civil Rights Era history to point out that the role of women and sexualized violence has been neglected. I had previously read of the brutality of Parchment Prison in Mississippi regarding Freedom Summer and the Freedom Riders. Still, I had not previously read about the sexualized mistreatment of women there. The national press (and much subsequent history) did not discuss the unnecessary strip searches, vaginal exams, and placing women in the prison exercise areas naked as a form of sexualized humiliation. Still, it was part of what police did to uphold segregation. I have previously read a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, who spoke and the 1964 Democratic National Convention about being beaten and sexually humiliated by police in Mississippi. But as The Dark End of the Street made it clear, this was a widespread tactic. It was not just Fannie Lou Hamer that was beaten and sexually abused that night; it was virtually all of the SNCC workers arrested that night, male and female.
“A report issued by the Medical Committee for Human Rights, an organization of physicians designed to provide medical assistance during Freedom Summer, showed that Georgia was not alone in its deployment of sexual abuse. The report documented “extreme sexual brutality” in Jackson, Mississippi, where police hit male activists’ testicles with clubs, pulled women’s dresses up, fondled their breasts, and ogled them while they were given vaginal exams. “As a woman,” Jeanne Noble exclaimed on WNEW, “I can think of no greater indignity than rape … or sexual exposure … or unsanitary conditions.” Height agreed and said that was why she called a special conference. The women’s organizations that attended, Height said, “came away … determined that this is one thing we could do as women … We could speak out and work toward the elimination of these horrible atrocities that seem to be vented against women and girls.” These abuses, which often occurred behind closed doors and were exposed only months later, garnered neither the media coverage nor the organizational support necessary to stop them from happening. Height and Noble deviated from their own organizations’ historic silence surrounding sexual violence by exposing the reality of rape and sexual abuse in Southern prisons.”
And the reality is that while the Civil Rights Era did result in more accountability for rape and other sexualized violence by civilians and officials, these changes were slow and have continued partly because of the difficulty in publicly discussing sexualized violence. Even in 1974, in the case of Joan Little, where Little killed a correctional officer who was sexually harassing her and then escaped from prison, her trial showed that many believed that sexual violence against prisoners was not considered inappropriate. (And that has continued.)
This recounting of the history toward the end of the book is worth quoting in full.
“Much had changed since 1947, when the NAACP, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice had launched a national and international campaign to free Rosa Lee Ingram. That year an all-white jury sentenced Ingram, a black sharecropper and mother of twelve, to death in the self-defense slaying of a white man in Ellaville, Georgia. In the 1940s it was nearly impossible for black victims of sexualized violence to receive justice in the courts. In 1944 a grand jury in Henry County, Alabama, refused to indict Recy Taylor’s assailants despite their admissions, a gubernatorial intervention, and a national campaign for her defense. In 1949 the Montgomery police department would not even hold a lineup for Gertrude Perkins, who charged two officers with kidnapping and rape. After a citywide protest, Perkins had her day in court, but the grand jury refused to indict anyone for the crime. Black women had achieved small victories in their fight for bodily integrity throughout the 1950s, but they were few and far between. It was not until 1959 that an all-white jury in Tallahassee, Florida, sentenced four white men to prison for life in the brutal gang rape of Betty Jean Owens. It took another six years before Mississippi, the most unreconstructed Southern state, followed suit. In 1965 an all-white jury in Hattiesburg sent Norman Cannon to prison for life for kidnapping and raping Rosa Lee Coates. Victories of the mid-1960s rested on decades of black women’s organizing and personal testimony. Courage and persistence had dramatically altered the political and legal landscape for black women raped or sexually abused by white men. Despite the threat of life sentences, some white men still believed black women’s bodies belonged to them. As a result, African-American women continued to organize and use their public voices to demand safety from sexual abuse. In 1974 Joan Little became the symbol of a campaign to defend black womanhood and to call attention to the sexualized racial violence that still existed ten years after Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.”
The epilogue of the book returned to the case of Recy Taylor. Danielle McGuire was able to interview Taylor and her family. Taylor lived until 2017, just miles away from where she was raped. The men who raped her lived in the same community until they died. They were never held accountable.
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 by Danielle McGuire Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook