42 pages • 1 hour read
Danielle L. McGuireAt 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
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Politics of Respectability
Content Warning: The source material and this study guide discuss rape and anti-Black racism.
The notion of the “politics of respectability” appears throughout At the Dark End of the Street, often deeply impacting how activists planned their campaigns (76). To gain widespread support for their political causes, many civil rights activists often felt pressured to present a respectable image of themselves. The need to convince white Southerners of Black people’s humanity particularly influenced how activists chose their leaders. This appeal to respectability shaped the Montgomery bus boycott, limiting which episodes of violence activists were able to confront. As a result, certain injustices were ignored by activists such as E. D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson because the victims did not match the image that activists hoped to present to the media.
Claudette Colvin was one such individual whose plight was overlooked by Montgomery’s civil rights activists. Colvin was, in many ways, an ideal figure for civil rights activists to organize around. She was one of the first individuals to directly challenge segregation laws in court, and many Black women began boycotting the segregated Montgomery buses in support of her. Though Robinson hoped to plan a bigger boycott in response to Colvin’s abuse, E. D. Nixon refused to support such a campaign after learning that she was a poor, unwed, pregnant teenager—the sort of person who fit into white supremacist stereotypes of Black people. Though Colvin was a “straight-A student,” Nixon refused to help Robinson turn Colvin into a symbol for the movement, saying, “She’s just not the kind we can win a case with” (75). In contrast, Nixon was ecstatic after learning that Rosa Parks was arrested for protesting bus segregation. Unlike Colvin, Parks was a middle-class woman whose reputation would not be as easy for the “white press” to attack (75).
McGuire contrasts the Montgomery bus boycott with Joan Little’s trial in 1975. After 20 years, respectability politics no longer seemed to matter as much as they did during the Montgomery bus boycott. In many ways, Little had a social status similar to Colvin’s. Little hailed from a poor background, and she had a bad reputation due to her repeated criminal activity. However, while Colvin’s story faded into obscurity, Little was able to garner national support for her plight. Little’s ability to become a national symbol of civil rights indicated that respectability politics had lost much of its importance by 1975. Despite Little’s lack of “middle-class decorum,” women across racial and class divisions were willing to support her (76).
Still, respectability politics affects Black Americans today. One of the primary assertions of the Black Lives Matter movement is that Black people are disproportionately targeted by police violence due to perceived criminality. Additionally, Black people who are murdered by police officers are frequently subjected to character assassination by the media. Clear examples of this include coverage of Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, which included a statement by The New York Times that he was “no angel,” and assertions that George Floyd’s 2020 murder was justified due to his past criminal record.
The Erasure of Women’s Roles in Civil Rights
Throughout her book, McGuire highlights the many ways in which women’s work for the civil rights movement became ignored or forgotten. While Rosa Parks was remembered as a prominent civil rights leader, the movement has otherwise been primarily remembered through its male leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. McGuire argues that Black women’s rights and activism have always been at the core of the civil rights movement. In McGuire’s history, the civil rights movement was not only a protest against segregation; it was motivated by a desire to protect Black women from white supremacist sexual violence. From Recy Taylor to Joan Little, McGuire highlights forgotten women whose assaults spurred massive protests, leading to a national reckoning with the South’s ongoing racism.
McGuire argues that many of the civil rights movement’s most famous protests began with protests against sexual violence. For instance, Rosa Parks gained her skills as a community organizer through protesting the assault of Recy Taylor. Such experience laid the groundwork for Parks and others to organize the massive Montgomery bus boycott 10 years later. In her chapters on the Montgomery bus boycott, McGuire discusses some of the ways that female activists became overshadowed by their male counterparts. For example, the Montgomery bus boycott originated from the work of Black women. The organization of the initial boycott was entirely prepared by Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council, which distributed hundreds of fliers announcing the boycott. Likewise, it was Rosa Parks’s bravery and refusal to obey segregation that stirred Montgomery’s Black community to fight segregation.
Despite this, Parks and Robinson were denied leadership of the boycott. On the day of Parks’s trial, in an all-male meeting of Montgomery’s prominent ministers, Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen as the boycott’s leader. Later that night, at the first meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association, King was invited to give a rousing speech to the crowd. Parks, by contrast, was encouraged by the male activists not to speak, telling her that she had already “said enough” (87). Though Parks remained the face of the movement, she became a silent symbol while King and other men served as the movement’s leaders.
The erasure of women in anti-racist activism is an issue that continues today. A prominent criticism levied at Black Lives Matter from within the movement is that Black male victims of police violence are remembered far more often than Black female victims. After the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, which centered on the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, the Say Her Name campaign launched to commemorate female victims of police violence like Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, and Shantel Davis. These activists argue that racial equality cannot be achieved if the violence against Black women consistently goes unaddressed.
The Importance of Testimony in Fighting Sexual Assault
In At the Dark End of the Street, McGuire frequently describes a “tradition of testimony and truth-telling” among Black American women (30). By doing so, McGuire highlights how Black women have bravely stood up to sexual violence throughout America’s history, even at times when their testimony went ignored. Historically, sexual violence against Black women was not considered a crime, and white people frequently dismissed Black women’s assault claims. In part, this is rooted in policies from chattel slavery, in which enslaved Black women were expected to endure sexual and reproductive violence. Considered the property of their enslavers, they had no bodily autonomy and could not control who they had sex with or when they had children. As a result, Black women’s testimony about sexual assault was not only a form of resistance against their specific abusers but against the systemic racism that considered them less than human.
The idea that Black women were property lingered after the Civil War and is made clear in the many cases of sexual violence described by McGuire in this book. A shocking example is the case of Betty Jean Owens, who was raped by a group of white men who set out with the explicit purpose of raping a Black woman. Their view of Black women as interchangeable receptacles for their violence points to a broader system of racism in which Black women are dehumanized. Owens bravely provided her testimony with the help of a nurse, showcasing the extent of her injuries. Due in large part to her testimony, the men were found guilty, setting an important precedent in cases of sexual violence perpetrated by white men against Black women. Nonetheless, her case also showed bias toward white men by giving them a lesser sentence than would typically be given to a Black perpetrator.
Likewise, Joan Little’s case shows the importance of testimony in changing attitudes about sexual assault. Attorney Jerry Paul used her testimony to get justice for her sexual assault, and he also brought in other incarcerated women to highlight the historical, systemic nature of this abuse. This created the important precedent of acknowledging Black women can act in self-defense when attacked by white men. While some may dismiss cases of sexual assault as singular episodes of violence, Black female activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer used testimony to assert that rape upholds power in a racist and patriarchal society. Testimony has remained an important tool in speaking out against rape, though the legal system still often fails victims of sexual violence. Still, McGuire argues that such protest strategies are deeply indebted to the work of Black women.
