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

Danielle McGuire is a historian whose work focuses on racial inequality in 20th-century US history. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University, and her research focused on the intersections of gender and racial inequality in US history. At the Dark End of the Street is adapted from her doctoral dissertation, “At the Dark End of the Street: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African-American Freedom Struggle,” which won the 2008 Lerner-Scott prize for best PhD dissertation in US women’s history. She has been a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, since 2008.

McGuire is also known for her scholarly articles examining intersectional struggles against racism and misogyny. Her chapter, “‘It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped’: Sexual Violence, Community, Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle” was published in Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the US South, Reconstruction to Present (2008). Through the lens of a 1959 hate crime in which two Black women were raped in Tallahassee, Florida, McGuire discusses how white supremacists used rape as a psychological weapon to terrorize Black Americans, similar to lynching. Other essays like “The Maid and Mr. Charlie: Rosa Parks and the Struggle for Black Women’s Bodily Integrity” in US Women’s History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood (2017) and “Joan Little and the Triumph of Testimony” in Freedom Rights: New Perspectives of the Civil Rights Movement (2011), provide new readings of the figures and circumstances discussed in At the Dark End of the Street.

Regarding her role as a white researcher of Black history, McGuire writes that it is her “responsibility as a white woman […] to document and denounce white supremacy; to use my privilege to amplify or make space for the voices and experiences of people who are silenced, ignored or disappeared by it” (“Meeting Mrs. Recy Taylor: On Being White and Writing Black History“ Detroit Free Press, 12 Oct. 2017). In recent years, McGuire’s work has focused on racial justice in Detroit, where she works and lives. Her chapter, “Murder at the Algiers Motel,” appears in Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies (2017) and discusses how the violent police response to a 1967 riot in Detroit caused the deaths of seven Black people, including a four-year-old and three teenagers. This topic is the subject of her forthcoming book, Murder in the Motor City: The 1967 Detroit Riot and American Injustice.