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 Audiobook (Free)

Rosa Parks was often referred to as a sweet and reticent seniors woman whose tired foot caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave delivery towards the civil rights movement.

The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay under the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written.

In this groundbreaking and important reserve, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a about In the Dark End of the road: Dark Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks towards the Rise of Black Power twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward house after an evening of singing and praying on the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white males, armed with kitchen knives and shotguns, purchased the young woman to their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for useless. The president of the neighborhood NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks. In dealing with this case, Parks launched a movement that ultimately transformed the world.

The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil legal rights motion began; how it had been in part were only available in protest against the ritualistic rape of dark females by white guys who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement; and how those pushes persisted unpunished through the entire Jim Crow era when white guys assaulted black females to enforce guidelines of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns through the entire South that began during World War II and experienced to the Black Power movement. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not the birth, of that struggle.

In the Dark End of the road describes the decades of degradation black females for the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to cook and clean for his or her white bosses. It reveals how Rosa Parks, by 1955 probably one of the most radical activists in Alabama, experienced had enough. “There had to be a preventing place,” she said, “and this appeared to be the place for me personally to stop getting pushed around.” Parks refused to go from her seat within the bus, was caught, and, with fierce activist Jo Ann Robinson, structured a one-day bus boycott.

The protest, intended to last twenty-four hours, became a yearlong struggle for dignity and justice. It broke the trunk from the Montgomery city bus lines and bankrupted the company.

We see how and just why Rosa Parks, instead of becoming a head from the movement she helped to start, was converted into a symbol of virtuous black womanhood, sainted and celebrated on her behalf quiet dignity, prim demeanor, and middle-class propriety-her radicalism all but erased. And we observe aswell how thousands of dark ladies whose courage and fortitude helped to change America were reduced to the footnotes of background.

A controversial, moving, and courageous publication; narrative history at its best.