At the Dark End of the Street (eBook)

Danielle L. McGuire (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010 | 1. Auflage
368 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-59447-1 (ISBN)

Infos

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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Groundbreaking, controversial, and courageous, here is the story of Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor—a story that reinterprets the history of America's civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed against Black women by white men. "e;An important step to finally facing the terrible legacies of race and gender in this country.” —The Washington PostRosa 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--Rosa Parks--to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against Black women and added fire to the growing call for change. 

Textauszug

PrologueON SEPTEMBER 3, 1944, the Rock Hill Holiness Church, in Abbeville, Alabama, rocked late into the night. It was nearly midnight when the doors of the wooden, one-story church swung open releasing streams of worshippers, all African American, into the moonlight. After a night of singing and praying, Recy Taylor, Fannie Daniel, and Daniel's eighteen year- old son, West, stepped out of the country chapel and strolled toward home alongside the peanut plantations that bounded the Abbeville-Headland highway. Taylor, a slender, copper-colored, and beautiful twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, noticed a rattletrap green Chevrolet pass them at least three times, young white men gawking from its windows. 'You reckon what they are up to?' Taylor asked. Taylor and Daniel, a stout sixty- one- year- old woman, watched the car creep by one last time and roll to a stop a few feet ahead of them. Seven men, armed with knives and guns, got out of the car and walked toward the women. Herbert Lovett, the oldest of the crew at twenty- four and a private in the U.S. Army, shouted, 'Halt!' When they ignored the order, Lovett leveled his shotgun. West tugged at his mother's sleeve, begging her to stop. 'They might shoot you,' he whispered. As the circle of men closed in, Lovett waved his gun at Taylor. 'We're looking for this girl, right there. She's the one that cut that white boy in Clopton this evening,' Lovett said, adding that the local sheriff, George H. Gamble, had dispatched the group to find the alleged assailant. 'You're wrong,' Fannie insisted. 'She's been to my house all day.' The men crowded closer, nodding their heads in agreement. 'Ain't this her?' Lovett asked. 'Yep, this the one,' Joe Culpepper said. 'I know her by the clothes she got on.' 'That's her,' Luther Lee agreed. 'Get her!' Lovett lurched toward Taylor and grabbed her arm. Then he turned to West and asked if Taylor was his wife. 'No,' West replied, 'she's Willie Guy Taylor's wife.' Undeterred, Lovett extended his hand to the teenager, ordered him to shake it, and promised not to hurt Taylor. 'We're going to take her up here and see if Mr. Gamble knows her,' Lovett claimed. 'If she's not the one, we'll bring her right back.' As Lovett spoke, Taylor managed to wrest her arm from his grasp and bolted toward a stand of trees behind a cabin.1 'Come back! Come back!' Fannie yelled. 'They going to shoot you. Come back!' 'Stop!' Lovett shouted. He cocked the gun at the back of her head. 'I'll kill you if you run.' Lovett walked Taylor to the car and shoved her into the backseat. Three men piled in behind her, while four others squeezed into the front. The headlights switched off and the car crept away. After a few miles, the green sedan turned off the main highway, rattled down a red-clay tractor path into the woods, and stopped in a grove of pecan trees. 'Y'all aren't carrying me to Mr. Gamble,' Taylor shouted. The men in the backseat clasped her wrists and ordered her to be quiet. Lovett grabbed his gun and waved Taylor and his companions out of the car. 'Get them rags off,' he barked, pointing the shotgun at her, 'or I'll kill you and leave you down here in the woods.' Sobbing, Taylor pulled off her clothes. 'Please,' she cried, 'let me go home to my husband and my baby.' Lovett spread an old hunting coat on the ground, told his friends to strip down to their socks and undershirts, and ordered Taylor to lie down. Lovett passed his rifle to a friend and took off his pants. Hovering over the young mother, he snarled, 'Act just like you do with your husband or I'll cut your...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.9.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• ISBN-10: 0-307-59447-5 / 0307594475
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-59447-1 / 9780307594471