The History of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women Who Inspired It

The Takeaway with John Hockenberry & Celeste Headlee

The History of the Civil Rights Movement & the Women Who Inspired It
Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Consider the history of the civil rights movement, but set aside for a moment the well-known stories from men: those of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and Andrew Goodman. If we examine the movement through the eyes of the women there at the time, what would the story sound like?

Everyone knows the story of Rosa Parks, an old and tired seamstress who refused to give up her seat for a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. But that moment had a long history behind it. Parks' story actually began with her work at the NAACP and her investigation of the brutal sexual abuse and rape of African American woman in the south. It's through that lens that author Danielle McGuire views the civil rights movement. She is the author of 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.

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.