At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement

A groundbreaking book by Danielle L. McGuire. 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. Black women's protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began during WWII and went through to the Black Power Movement. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not the birth, of that movement.