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

Chapter 5 describes the rape of Betty Owens and the subsequent trial in Tallahassee, Florida. In May 1959, four white men—Patrick Scarborough, David Beagles, William Collinsworth, and Ollie Stoutamire—were drinking and decided to assault a Black woman. They found a car of students from the historically Black Florida A&M University (FAMU), who were returning from a dance. The men approached the car wielding a shotgun and a switchblade. They then abducted Betty Owens and drove away to repeatedly rape her. The remaining Black students immediately reported the abduction to the police, who pursued and eventually arrested the rapists. The four men were unafraid of facing consequences for their crime, laughing throughout the arrest and providing confessions that convicted them of armed assault. Though Florida’s laws stipulated that rapists should receive the death penalty, only Black men had ever been executed or tried for raping white women under those laws.

News of the rape spurred the students at FAMU to stage protests in support of Owens. These students appealed to notions of the “protection of womanhood,” using similar language that white men often used when justifying the lynchings of alleged Black rapists (136). The resulting media pressure led Judge W. May Walker to call an emergency closed grand jury meeting only days after the attack. Owens attended the meeting, accompanied by a nurse due to her sustained injuries and “severe depression” following the assault. Though the four men pled innocent, the case went to trial—a rarity in Florida’s history. In the days leading up to the trial, numerous civil rights leaders issued statements arguing that white male rapists must be punished according to the same standards applied to Black rapists. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement about the trial, he noted how hypocritical the United States was for fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War in the name of freedom while domestically upholding racist Jim Crow laws.

The trial began on June 12, 1959, with hundreds of spectators. Owens testified to the events of the assault, claiming that she thought she would be murdered if she tried to resist the attack. In the cross-examination, the defense attempted to paint Owens as a promiscuous woman, asking whether she was a virgin and whether she “derive[d] any pleasure” from the rape (145). The next day, the four white men testified, admitting that they used armed weapons and had sex with Owens, but they claimed that the sex was consensual. In the closing statement, the defense argued that the accused men were “wholesome, innocent and decent,” and the defense asked the jury whether they were “going to believe a ni**** wench over these four boys?” (148).

After deliberating, the jury found the four men guilty of rape, but it recommended that the men receive mercy for their punishment. As a result, the men were sentenced to life in prison but were not sentenced to the electric chair. Many African Americans viewed the trial as a positive step toward equality since no white man had previously been tried or convicted for raping a Black woman in Florida. However, far more Black people were unhappy with the trial’s result because it proved that white rapists were still treated more leniently by the law than their Black counterparts.

McGuire opens Chapter 6 with a discussion of the forms of sexual violence and assault that female activists frequently faced in Southern jails. One such woman is Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after being harassed for registering to vote. Hamer was intimately acquainted with the history of sexual abuse against Black women; her grandmother was constantly raped while she was enslaved. Hamer, meanwhile, was herself a victim of abuse, and a doctor performed a hysterectomy on her without her knowledge or consent. In June 1963, Hamer was arrested with other organizers for attempting to integrate a bus station lunch counter. The police officers brutally raped Hamer and the other female organizers. Rather than stay silent, Hamer publicly discussed her experience of assault, “offering up her testimony as a form of resistance to the sexual and racial injustice of segregation” (159).

Hamer was one of many women who began to break the silence surrounding prison sexual assaults in the 1960s. Dorothy Height and Jeanne Noble, both presidents of prominent Black women’s social clubs, appeared on a New York radio show in 1963 to discuss how civil rights activists were often assaulted by white police officers. While such clubs had traditionally been silent about issues of sexuality and rape, Height and Noble decided to break the silence to combat sexual violence. In 1964, Height called a meeting of both Black and white women’s social clubs in Atlanta, hoping to organize the middle-class members of these clubs to fight sexual violence and “police brutality” (163). The resulting program, “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” inspired Black and white women in Atlanta to witness and participate in civil rights programs in towns in the Deep South. However, while the women participated in community service programs, they were ill-prepared for the more complex task of combating sexual violence.

In 1964, the SNCC planned the Freedom Summer, in which Northern white students were brought to Mississippi to volunteer for civil rights causes and register Black voters. The SNCC believed that bringing in white Northerners would attract greater media attention for their cause as well as protection from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which was more likely to use resources to protect white volunteers than Black ones. Southern segregationists saw the influx of Northern volunteers and FBI agents as an invasion, and they armed themselves in preparation for violent clashes.

Behind the segregationists’ paranoia was the racist fear that the Northern volunteers were “beatniks” who would force Southerners to practice interracial sex (167). Such fears were stoked by the fact that Northern white women frequently socialized with Black men in Mississippi, a taboo in Southern society that led to acts of retaliatory violence from the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations. However, the Freedom Summer and other civil rights programs still proved successful. They pushed President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, which outlawed public forms of segregation.