Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks t

(TRIGGER WARNING FOR SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT)

So, in continuation of my post about the Black Feminist Queer praxis that the Black Lives Matter movement is rooted in, I will continue to focus on book recommendations as well as report on my new involvement with activist project Free Marissa Alexander movement of the East Bay California movement.

Today I would like to recommend this book. I know many people have been taught that Rosa Parks ‘just sat down’ as her contribution, but she was a engaged in what I would call Black feminist activism way before she became famous for sitting down on seats designated for whites. The book is called 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

) and description is below.

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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.(Source: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307389243/ref=dra_a_sm_ff_fx_it_P2000_1000?tag=dradisplay-20&ascsubtag=4a251a2ef9bbf4ccc35f97aba2c9cbda&dra_hfr=1&dra_ohs=0-0)