At the Dark End of the Street

Summary: Even in civil rights history, the role of women, especially their work to end sexualized violence, has been under-appreciated.

I have owned At the Dark End of the Street for years, and I have not picked it up because I knew that it would be a difficult book to read. However, taking the concept of trigger warnings seriously, this is a book that discusses sexual violence and rape frequently. It is not described luridly, but in discussing the reality of the use of rape as a form of terrorism and an expression of white supremacy (in the sense of racial superiority), sexual violence is described regularly throughout the book. But as I continue to interact with people about race and historical issues, I am convinced that these difficult topics have to be discussed because the lack of discussion is part of what whitewashes history.

At the Dark End of the Street is a reworking of Danielle McGuire's dissertation. The broad thesis is that the civil rights movement has suppressed or at least under-appreciated the role of women organizing against sexual violence.

“Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and many other places had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood. And yet analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement...”

“The enormous spotlight that focused on King, combined with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid the women's long struggle in the dimly lit background, obscuring the origins of the MIA and erasing women from the movement. For decades, the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Parks's spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men like Fred Gray, Martin Luther King, Jr., E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy. While these men had a major impact on the emerging protest movement, it was black women's decade-long struggle against mistreatment and abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. Without an appreciation for the particular predicaments of black women in the Jim Crow South, it is nearly impossible to understand why thousands of working-class and hundreds of middle-class black women chose to walk rather than ride the bus for 381 days.

“A report issued by the Medical Committee for Human Rights, an organization of physicians designed to provide medical assistance during Freedom Summer, showed that Georgia was not alone in its deployment of sexual abuse. The report documented “extreme sexual brutality” in Jackson, Mississippi, where police hit male activists' testicles with clubs, pulled women's dresses up, fondled their breasts, and ogled them while they were given vaginal exams. “As a woman,” Jeanne Noble exclaimed on WNEW, “I can think of no greater indignity than rape ... or sexual exposure ... or unsanitary conditions.” Height agreed and said that was why she called a special conference. The women's organizations that attended, Height said, “came away ... determined that this is one thing we could do as women ... We could speak out and work toward the elimination of these horrible atrocities that seem to be vented against women and girls.” These abuses, which often occurred behind closed doors and were exposed only months later, garnered neither the media coverage nor the organizational support necessary to stop them from happening. Height and Noble deviated from their own organizations' historic silence surrounding sexual violence by exposing the reality of rape and sexual abuse in Southern prisons.”

“Much had changed since 1947, when the NAACP, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice had launched a national and international campaign to free Rosa Lee Ingram. That year an all-white jury sentenced Ingram, a black sharecropper and mother of twelve, to death in the self-defense slaying of a white man in Ellaville, Georgia. In the 1940s it was nearly impossible for black victims of sexualized violence to receive justice in the courts. In 1944 a grand jury in Henry County, Alabama, refused to indict Recy Taylor's assailants despite their admissions, a gubernatorial intervention, and a national campaign for her defense. In 1949 the Montgomery police department would not even hold a lineup for Gertrude Perkins, who charged two officers with kidnapping and rape. After a citywide protest, Perkins had her day in court, but the grand jury refused to indict anyone for the crime. Black women had achieved small victories in their fight for bodily integrity throughout the 1950s, but they were few and far between. It was not until 1959 that an all-white jury in Tallahassee, Florida, sentenced four white men to prison for life in the brutal gang rape of Betty Jean Owens. It took another six years before Mississippi, the most unreconstructed Southern state, followed suit. In 1965 an all-white jury in Hattiesburg sent Norman Cannon to prison for life for kidnapping and raping Rosa Lee Coates. Victories of the mid-1960s rested on decades of black women's organizing and personal testimony. Courage and persistence had dramatically altered the political and legal landscape for black women raped or sexually abused by white men. Despite the threat of life sentences, some white men still believed black women's bodies belonged to them. As a result, African-American women continued to organize and use their public voices to demand safety from sexual abuse. In 1974 Joan Little became the symbol of a campaign to defend black womanhood and to call attention to the sexualized racial violence that still existed ten years after Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.”