Danielle McGuire
Brett Mountain Photography LLC
http://detroit.blogs.time.com/2010/09/07/qa-danielle-l-mcguire-on-civil-rights-and-detroit/
All,
This is a very important new book by the brilliant Detroit historian, professor, and scholar Danielle McGuire that is destined to have a profound and lasting impact on our perceptions, and understanding of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s, '50s. and '60s, and an even more transformative effect on our ongoing appreciation and study of the pervasive, extraordinary and thoroughly revolutionary role of African American women in modern U.S. history...
Kofi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qztUvhJq4mc&feature=player_embedded
FROM REVIEWS :
"One one of those rare studies that makes a well-known story seem startlingly new. Anyone who thinks he knows the history of the modern civil rights movement needs to read this terrifying, illuminating book." —Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age, winner of the National Book Award.
"McGuire restores to memory the courageous black women who dared seek legal remedy, when black women and their families faced particular hazards for doing so. McGuire brings the reader through a dark time via a painful but somehow gratifying passage in this compelling, carefully documented work."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"This gripping story changes the history books, giving us a revised Rosa Parks and a new civil rights story. You can’t write a general U.S. history without altering crucial sentences because of McGuire’s work. Masterfully narrated, At the Dark End of the Street presents a deep civil rights movement with women at the center, a narrative as poignant, painful and complicated as our own lives." —Timothy B. Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
"Just when we thought there couldn’t possibly be anything left to uncover about the civil rights movement, Danielle McGuire finds a new facet of that endlessly prismatic struggle at the core of our national identity. By reinterpreting black liberation through the lens of organized resistance to white male sexual aggression against African-American women, McGuire ingeniously upends the white race’s ultimate rationale for its violent subjugation of blacks—imputed black male sexual aggression against white women. It is an original premise, and At the Dark End of the Street delivers on it with scholarly authority and narrative polish."
—Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
"Following the lead of pioneers like Darlene Clark Hine, Danielle McGuire details the all too ignored tactic of rape of black women in the everyday practice of southern white supremacy. Just as important, she plots resistance against this outrage as an integral facet of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This book is as essential as its history is infuriating." —Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People
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.
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Knopf (September 7, 2010)
The Detroit Blog
One year. One city. Endless opportunities.
Q&A: Danielle L. McGuire on Civil Rights and Detroit
Posted by KAREN DYBIS Tuesday, September 7, 2010
For most Detroiters, the name “Rosa Parks” generates a wealth of images, mostly that of an older, graying matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement. But do you know anything about a young, vibrant Rosa Parks? What do you know about this radical, vigilant woman with a passionate devotion to female equality?
Today, with the release of Danielle L. McGuire's new book, “At the Dark End of the Street,” people can learn about a new side of Rosa Parks. They also can discover other previously unknown female freedom fighters. McGuire, an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, retells the story of the Civil Rights Movement with a focus on its violent past and champions the role of women in that struggle.
I'm about half way through the book, and I'm in love with the people McGuire found and gave voice to within her story. I spoke with her recently about what inspired the book, how she developed her sources and what it is like to be a White woman in Detroit teaching African-American studies.
Q: How did you find this story?
A: It was a coincidence. I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and I was helping one of my professors clean out his office and file things away. We were listening to NPR and they were doing a series on Civil Rights. The host was interviewing the White editor of Montgomery Advertiser, and he said that a woman named Gertrude Perkins was one of the most important people in terms of the Montgomery bus boycott. My professor was a Civil Rights scholar; both he and I were stumped as to who she was. We thought this guy was crazy. I went to the archives over the next week or so, ordered the Montgomery Advertiser and found the story of Gertrude Perkins. Turns out she was walking home from a party and was stopped by two Montgomery police officers. They took her to the railroad tracks and raped her. She went to her pastor and told him what happened. Her pastor sent the story to a (syndicated radio show host), who talked about it on air. Perkins went to the police station and reported it the next day. This was an incredible act for a Black woman and for the 1940s. This was years before the bus boycott, and it was the first time some of these ministers got together and stopped arguing. They came together to demand a trial for her. There was coverage in the White newspapers for months. … When I started reading Black newspapers, I began seeing rape cases happening regularly. Black women were assaulted by bus drivers, store owners, police officers. One of the major boycotts came after a teen-ager was raped by grocery store owner. They community boycotted the store and took it out of business. … These women had no other way to support themselves other than taking a bus; it was their own form of transportation if they were domestics who made only $500 a year. They had a right to walk through the world without being molested. They had been talking about it for a decade before the (Montgomery Bus Boycott) happened. That's when I started to see it as a women's movement instead of just spontaneous combustion. Being abused on the bus was the bane of their existence, so it makes sense to target the buses. (More on Time.com: Read a story on Rosa Parks)
Q: How did you develop your research?
A: Back in 1998, I was asking, “Who is Gertrude Perkins?” By 2004, I knew exactly who she was and why (the man on NPR) said described her as so important. Each article, each little bit of documentation I found was a puzzle piece. It took a really long time to put it together. The evidence had to reveal itself to me. It was fascinating following these stories. … These are stories that were common knowledge in Black culture for decades. A lot of times, we only talk about equal access or the right to vote. Not a lot of people had looked at this (violence against Black women). This touches people's lives on a deep level.
Q: Does one moment stand out the most?
A: I interviewed Recy Taylor in 2008 after her family found me. I got a call from her youngest brother, who Googled his sister's name and saw I was writing about her. Her family has followed the case for years, tracking her assailants for years. They called me and asked if I wanted the real story. At that point, I hadn't been able to find her because she had remarried. I met with them on the day of President Obama's inauguration. I was nervous to talk to them, and I kept doing a lot of warm up questions. She finally looked at the camera and said, “This is what happened.” Here I am, intimidated, and this woman is not. She told the story very matter of factly. It was the first time many young people in her family had heard the story, and they felt very angry. The family wanted some measure of fairness from the past. Everywhere I went – everyone tells the same stories. (More on Time.com: See "A Woman's Right to Vote")
Q: What kind of feedback are you getting from people – Black and White?
A: The African Americans I spoke to for the book who survived sexual abuse wanted somebody – they didn't care who – to pay attention. They didn't care who looked into it; they were just so happy someone did it. … I was on the Mildred Gaddis radio show recently, and she and her audience couldn't have been better. People were calling in, asking questions, sending me emails afterward. … I am a White woman teaching Black history and writing about Black history. I'd say 90 percent don't mind. There are a handful who believe it should only be written and taught by their people. I emphasize with that position to some degree. But I think we can't limit who writers about history as long as they do it with evidence and truthfully. I was in the Afro-American studies program at Wisconsin, and it was one of the first in the nation. Even at Wayne State, I've had classes that have a majority of Black students, and it has been a joy. People are really incredible. I see the looks, but after a couple classes, they're cool. I think they respect that I know the history and I've taken time to learn it. And I'm not so-called color blind. … Working in Detroit has really been an incredible experience. I've never had experiences like this that were so joyful and so challenging. It is so full of diamonds in the rough, ready to sparkle and waiting to be seen. (More on Time.com: See pictures of Detroit's beautiful, horrible decline)
To order McGuire's new book, click http://www.amazon.com/At-Dark-End-Street-Resistance/dp/030726906X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1282236956&sr=8-1here.
To check out her Web site, click here: http://atthedarkendofthestreet.com/
To read more please click on following link:
http://detroit.blogs.time.com/2010/09/07/qa-danielle-l-mcguire-on-civil-rights-and-detroit/#ixzz10OeT7qFC
