Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly
woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on
Montgomery's city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous
act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil
rights movement.
The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the
1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written.
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.
"
At the Dark End of the Street" describes the decades of degradation
black women on the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to
cook and clean for their white bosses. It reveals how Rosa Parks,
by 1955 one of the most radical activists in Alabama, had had
enough. "There had to be a stopping place," she said, "and this
seemed to be the place for me to stop being pushed around." Parks
refused to move from her seat on the bus, was arrested, and, with
fierce activist Jo Ann Robinson, organized a one-day bus boycott.
The protest, intended to last twenty-four hours, became a yearlong
struggle for dignity and justice. It broke the back of the
Montgomery city bus lines and bankrupted the company.
We see how and why Rosa Parks, instead of becoming a leader of the
movement she helped to start, was turned into a symbol of virtuous
black womanhood, sainted and celebrated for her quiet dignity, prim
demeanor, and middle-class propriety--her radicalism all but
erased. And we see as well how thousands of black women whose
courage and fortitude helped to transform America were reduced to
the footnotes of history.
"
"A controversial, moving, and courageous book; narrative history at
its best.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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