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

“On October 5, 1892, hundreds of black women converged on Lyric Hall in New York City to hear Ida B. Wells’s thunderous voice. While black men were being accused of ravishing white women, she argued, ‘The rape of helpless Negro girls, which began in slavery days, still continues without reproof from church, state or press.’”

Ida B. Wells’s comment from 1892 echoes the concerns of many of the Black female activists discussed throughout McGuire’s book. By quoting from Wells’ speech in 1892, McGuire emphasizes the long history of sexual violence against Black women.

“Despite the promises of a progressive New South, the legacy of slavery in the Black Belt was palpable. Tenant farming and debt peonage dominated the economy, and the ghosts of the ‘peculiar institution’ haunted the rolling landscape, where the children and grandchildren of slaves and slave owners eyed each other with fear and familiarity.”

Though the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in the United States in 1865, slavery’s effects were felt for decades afterward. Black people remained trapped in cycles of poverty and occupied a lower social position than white people in the South, and they were denied many of the rights that white people have. The various laws and practices that kept Black people from gaining full social equality were known as Jim Crow, and any understanding of sexual violence in the South against Black women must be considered in this larger societal context.

“Instead, Gamble sent Wilson home with a $250 bond and instructions to have his parents sign and return it at their leisure. The sheriff did not call the other men in, issue any warrants, or make any arrests.”

Though Hugo Wilson confessed to having sex with Recy Taylor and named the other men involved in her rape, Sheriff Gamble chose not to arrest any of the men or question anyone besides Wilson. Gamble effectively halted a full investigation into Taylor’s rape, all but ensuring that none of the men would be imprisoned for the assault. Such a decision can be viewed as one of the ways the Southern justice system prioritized the freedom of white men over the protection of the bodily autonomy of Black women.

“‘Failure to act in any such case,’ the soldiers argued, ‘is a matter of grave concern to everyone believing in the principles of American democracy—the principle of the equality of all before the law, regardless of race, color or religion; particularly to those of us who face a ruthless enemy to preserve that democracy.’”

This quote comes from a letter written by soldiers fighting in World War II, which petitioned Governor Sparks to fully investigate Taylor’s rape and bring her assailants to justice. Though these soldiers were fighting in Europe in the name of American freedom and democracy, they were dismayed by the ways that America failed to protect the freedoms of all its citizens.

“‘The only chance you have to secure redress for this terrible attack,’ the NAACP assistant counsel asserted in the rape and dragging of Ruby Pigford, ‘is by publicity and pressure within the State of Mississippi, and you, of course, who are in Mississippi, will know how much can be done.’”

Governments in the South always chose to ignore cases of sexual assault against Black women to avoid controversy. As a result, African American activists created a strategy of publicizing such rapes as widely as they could, hoping that national attention would force the South to bring these cases to trial.

“‘This is what we’re fighting for […] When we say ‘Equal Justice for Recy Taylor,’ Buckmaster wrote, ‘we are also saying Equal Hope, Equal Joy, Equal Dignity for every woman, child and man the wide world over […] Is that too much to ask?’”

After the grand jury failed to indict anyone connected to Taylor’s assault, the Committee for Equal Justice published a pamphlet announcing its intention to continue to fight against all instances of racialized sexual violence. The Committee for Equal Justice argued that Recy Taylor’s rape was not a singular instance of violence. The committee claimed it was part of a larger pattern that sought to keep Black women from attaining joy and freedom.

“On July 17, 1946—Election Day—veteran Maceo Snipes walked past armed thugs patrolling the ballot box to cast his first and last ballot. Later that night, four white men dragged him out of his house and murdered him.”

Advancements in legal protections for Black people’s rights often resulted in a backlash of violence from white supremacists who sought to curtail increasing social equality. Though Thurgood Marshall won a case in the Supreme Court that outlawed the South’s all-white Democratic primaries, Maceo Snipes was still killed for participating in the primary.

“Black activists in the post-World War II period often joked that the closer a black man got to a ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist.”

White opposition to integration was often based on fears of interracial sex. Many Southern white people believed that Black men only wanted full legal equality to have sex with white women. Black activists in this quote joke that for Southern white people, there was no difference between a Black man participating in an election and raping a white woman.

“As Brooks struggled to stand, the police officer, M. E. Mills, pointed his pistol at Brooks and, in the bright afternoon sun, shot him dead. Satisfied with the assailants’ claim of self-defense, the mayor cleared them of any wrongdoing.”

On the segregated Montgomery bus lines, harsh violence was often used against any Black people who protested the bus drivers’ rules. In 1950, the unarmed Hilliard Brooks was shot dead by a police officer after simply questioning a bus driver’s refusal to let him board the bus. Despite the clear power imbalance, the police officer was considered to be acting in self-defense.

“Clambering back onto the bus, Cleere pointed at Colvin. ‘I have had trouble out of that thing before,’ he said.”

The bus driver Robert Cleere said this to two police officers after Claudette Colvin refused Cleere’s orders to give up her bus seat. The statement illustrates that for many white Southerners, Black women were not even human, just “things” with no rights.

“‘I started protecting my crotch,’ Colvin remembered. ‘I was afraid they might rape me.’”

Police officers frequently assaulted Black women throughout the South, and stories of these rapes traveled throughout Black communities. As a result, Black women like Colvin were terrorized into obeying police officers, fearful that the slightest protest might result in assault.

“When Colvin answered the door, Nixon saw that she was pregnant. ‘My daughter,’ Colvin’s mother explained, ‘done took a tumble.’ Nixon decided that Colvin could not possibly serve as the community’s standard-bearer, nor be a good litigant.”

Though activists were eager to organize a bus boycott in response to Colvin’s arrest, civil rights leader E. D. Nixon argued that Colvin could not be the symbol of their movement due to her status as a poor, unwed, pregnant woman. Such a decision aligned with the “politics of respectability,” in which Black civil rights leaders aimed to present an image of the Black community that aligned with middle-class white people’s moral standards.

“The flyers announced the boycott, promoting it as an effort to protect black womanhood: ‘Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down.’”

For the female organizers of the Montgomery bus boycott, the protest was not only about opposing racism in the South; it was also about protesting the way that Black women’s bodies were mistreated. McGuire argues that it was the work of Black feminists and the ideal of protecting the autonomy of Black womanhood that lay at the core of numerous civil rights actions such as the Montgomery bus boycott.

“Nixon’s tirade may have convinced the ministers to stand up for black women, but it did not mean they planned to share leadership with them. Indeed, Jo Ann Robinson and Rosa Parks, the two women who made the boycott possible, were not at the meeting where the Montgomery Improvement Association was born and Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen as its president.”

Though it was the work of two Black women—Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson—that initially sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, the movement was ultimately taken over by a group of male leaders. As a result, the roles that many Black women played in the boycott’s organization have been overlooked.

“‘You make a Negro believe he is equal to the white people,’ he said, ‘and the first thing he wants is a white woman. And that’s why there are so many criminal assaults and rapes.’”

This quote, stated by pro-segregationist Judge Leander Perez, illustrates the tactics that segregationists used to drum up support for their opposition to integration. Individuals such as Perez openly stirred up paranoia and fear among white people, claiming that societal integration would inevitably lead to miscegenation and the rape of white women.

“James J. Kilpatrick, the elegant and conservative editor of the Richmond News-Leader, told James Baldwin that he regarded the Negro writer as a citizen, but that did not mean he wanted Baldwin to marry his daughter. ‘You’re not worried about me marrying your daughter,’ Baldwin shot back. ‘You’re worried about me marrying your wife’s daughter. I’ve been marrying your daughter since the days of slavery.’”

Baldwin’s retort to Kilpatrick refers to the hypocritical attitudes white society had toward interracial sex. While white people were fearful of Black men having sex with white women, the rape of Black women by white men was often tacitly accepted throughout Southern society.

“Because black musicians performed in front of segregated but sold-out crowds of screaming, ecstatic teenagers, it became impossible to maintain a strict color line in the South.”

White segregationists were fearful that their children would socialize with African Americans, and they took great pains to instill in their children the dangers of integration through books and other pieces of propaganda. However, Black musicians grew in popularity during the 1950s, and their concerts in the South often resulted in packed auditoriums where interracial contact was inevitable.

“Student leader Buford Gibson, speaking to a crowd, universalized the attack when he said, ‘You must remember it wasn’t just one Negro girl that was raped—it was all of Negro womanhood in the South.’”

In addressing the rape of Betty Jean Owens, Gibson argued that Owens’s assault is not a singular incident. He claimed it was part of a long pattern of abuse that sought to deny Black women ownership of their bodies. Gibson universalized Owens’ assault, imploring students to protest it to better protect all of the Black women in their lives.

“Dr. M. C. Williams, a local black leader, shouted, ‘Four colored men would be dead if the situation had been reversed. It looks like an open and shut case.’”

In this comment, Williams pointed to the stark hypocrisy in the Southern courts’ treatment of white and Black rapists. While Owens’s assailants were offered a full jury trial, Williams argued that four Black men accused of rape would have been lynched before a trial could even occur.

“If she was at all unclear about this lesson, the forced hysterectomy she received in 1961 when she went to the hospital to have a small cyst removed from her stomach left little room for confusion. ‘I went to the doctor who did that to me,’ she said, ‘and I asked him, Why? Why had he done that to me?’”

In 1961, Fannie Lou Hamer unwillingly received a hysterectomy during her surgery for a cyst. The practice, a so-called “Mississippi appendectomy,” was often performed by white doctors who sought to curtail Black women’s reproduction. The episode illustrated for Hamer how “a Black woman’s body was never hers alone” (156).

“[Hamer] told her story on national television at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, and to congressmen investigating civil rights abuses in June 1964, and she continued to tell it ‘until the day she died,’ offering up her testimony as a form of resistance to the sexual and racial injustice of segregation.”

Rather than stay silent, Hamer openly and thoroughly described her sexual assault in numerous public forums, including the Democratic National Convention. Through repeated testimony, Hamer convinced a broader white public of the sexual abuse inflicted upon Black women throughout the South.

“Named after the assistant secretary of labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the ‘Moynihan Report’ blamed decades of matriarchy for the ‘crisis’ of black family pathology and degeneration, instead of the legacy of white supremacy, laws banning interracial marriage, and the historic rape of black women by white men.”

In the Moynihan report, the federal government argued that Black people’s social inequality stemmed from a lack of strong father figures. Black activists were outraged; they saw the report as willfully ignoring how the matriarchal structure of many Black families, as well as Black poverty, was a product of ongoing, systemic racism.

“The Joan Little case proved that respectability still mattered, but only to a degree. Despite the fact that Paul compared Little to Rosa Parks, she was nothing like the heroine of the Montgomery bus boycott.”

The previous successes of both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement meant that Little did not have to adhere as closely to the politics of respectability. Though Little was a poor woman with a reputation as a criminal, she was still able to garner widespread support throughout the nation.