At the dark end of the street : black women, rape, and resistance -- the Civil Rights movement from Rosa Parks to the rise of black power.

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Dark End of the Street
White man has always claimed the "right" of sexual access to darker women.
Colonialism and attendant conquest legitimized this right of (in effect) rape.
væ victis
Woe to the vanquished
(slavery is a woman)

Dark End of the Street

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

1944 Rape : Rosa Parks took her case
Recy Taylor ~ Willie Guy Taylor
Recy Taylor, Willie Guy Taylor, and their child, Joyce Lee Taylor

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by Danielle L. McGuire

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. [see]

Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Recy Taylor NOW (from the-root) A Symbol of Jim Crow's Forgotten Horror

Rosa Parks inspires . . . the hope that all of us could be that brave, that serenely human, when crunch time comes.
~ former US poet laureate Rita Dove ~

Publishers Weekly Review
McGuire's "new history" shines fresh light upon the germinal role of black women in the birth and development of the civil rights movement. "For decades," she writes, "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." McGuire, assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, goes behind that story to tell of black women's struggles against abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. She foregrounds black women's experiences of "verbal, physical, and sexual abuse" as prime movers of the grassroots movement. From the rape of Recy Taylor (1944) to the rape of Joan Little (1975), McGuire restores to memory the courageous black women who dared seek legal remedy, when black women and their families faced particular hazards for doing so. McGuire brings the reader through a dark time via a painful but somehow gratifying passage in this compelling, carefully documented work.

(Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information
Booklist Review
Long before Rosa Parks became famous for resisting Jim Crow laws, she was engaged in advocating for social justice for black women who were the victims of sexual violence at the hands of white men. Historian McGuire aims to rewrite the history of the civil rights movement by highlighting sexual violence in the broader context of racial injustice and the fight for freedom. Parks worked as an investigator for the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama, specializing in cases involving black women who had been sexually assaulted by white men -- cases that often went untried and were the political opposite of the allegations of black men raping white women ending in summary lynching with or without trials. McGuire traces the history of several rape cases that triggered vehement resistance by the NAACP and other groups, including the 1975 trial of Joan Little, who killed a white jailer who sexually assaulted her. Despite the long tradition of dismissing charges brought by blacks against whites, several of the cases ended in convictions, as black women asserted their right to be treated justly. --Vanessa Bush

Slavery is a woman: colonialism legitimized white-man's "right" to rape

Were Male Leaders of Civil Rights Movement Unfair to the Women?

To Tell the Truth Freely: Ida Wells exposes terrorism of lynching

The prophetic witness for truth and justice (a democratic essential)

Southern sociology (women caught twixt a rock and a hard place)

The prevalence of rape (or coercion) oof black women by white men

Emmett Till :: a wink and a leer and the brutal murder that followed

Emmett's mother tries to make something positive come from tragedy

God is our Refuge and Strength

Danielle L. McGuire was born in Janesville, Wisconsin. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received her Ph D from Rutgers University in 2007. Since attaining her doctorate, she has gone on to win numerous teaching and research awards. Her dissertation on sexualized racial violence and the African American freedom struggle received the 2008 Lerner Scott Prize for best dissertation in women's history. It was also the runner up for the Allen Nevins Prize, offered annually by the Society of American Historians for best-written dissertation on an American subject.
As a graduate student, McGuire won the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award for her Journal of American History essay, "It was Like We Were All Raped: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization and the African American Freedom Struggle." The same essay won the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best essay in southern women's history and was reprinted in the Best Essays in American History 2006. McGuire is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
Danielle McGuire is currently an assistant professor in the History Department at Wayne State University and lives in Detroit, Michigan.
Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form
of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.

[Andrea Dworkin}

Canción del Triunfo ~ Song of Triumph
Spanish Magazine   "Fuera de Serie"
Paints Michelle Obama as Esclava

Michelle Obama as Esclava

See
Michelle Tataranieta De Esclava, Dueña De América
par Karine Percheron-Daniel

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 29, 2012 at 10:35 am

See the famous painting by Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist

Fuera de Serie, a Spanish magazine, has created an international uproar with its latest cover, in which it photoshops First Lady Michelle Obama into a French painting, and ends up portraying her as a slave woman, with her right breast exposed. If the cover had been published in America, it's easy to imagine the quarters from which it might have come, and what the image would have been intended to convey. But the full context is much more complicated -- and much more revealing -- than that.

I don't think the intention of the cover is to be racist, or to denigrate Mrs. Obama in any way. In the editor's note introducing the issue in which the story appears, Fuera de Serie explains, roughly translated, that the author, "in order to understand the manner in which Michelle has seduced the American people, the journalist Pablo Scarpellini details the secrets of the woman who has not only conquered the heart of Barack Obama." The title is "Michelle: Granddaughter of a Slave, Lady of America," which suggests her as a powerful symbol of the American experience, though it's off by a couple of generations. The article itself may turn out to be less positive, but that kind of language doesn't indicate a desire to sell a vision of Michelle Obama as a slave. Marie-Guillemine Benoist, who painted the work Obama is photoshopped into as a commemoration of the French abolition of slavery, was explicitly a feminist, and her work, when it was first exhibited, was interpreted as humanist.

But while the generations between her enslaved ancestors and Michelle Obama may seem distant to the editors of Fuera de Serie, but I'd venture to guess that it is a nearer shadow to Michelle Obama herself, and to many, many Americans. The state of African-Americans is such that the prospect of being harassed or killed by representatives of the state, of facing major challenges to economic self-determination, is not something that seems so broadly outlandish that it can be invoked without conjuring up the specter of real and ongoing harm. This image of Michelle Obama could only be liberating in a world where there aren't a lot of people who are vocal about their desire to put the first black First Lady back into what they believe to be her place. History's ghosts are powerful. Those who dare summon them should be clear about what they want, and be prepared for the consequences

thanks to thinkprogress.org

"Slavery is a woman" - colonialism legitimized white man's "right" to rape

An H Reference Phyllis Wheatley's Prophecy to General George Washington

President John F. Kennedy exhorts: We cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.

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We need our values still


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In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit

AMEN

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Robert Shepherd
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