Analysis Of Mcguire's At The Dark End Of The Street

Malcolm X stated that the most disrespected, unprotected and neglected person in America is the black woman. Black women have long suffered from racism in American history and also from sexism in the broader aspect of American society and even within the black community; black women are victims of intersection between anti-blackness and misogyny sometimes denoted to as "misogynoir". Often when the civil rights movement is being retold, the black woman is forgotten or reduced to a lesser role within the movement and represented as absent in the struggle, McGuire 's 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 does not make this same mistake.

McGuire does this by redefining the roles played by influential female figures, such as Rosa Parks, taking a personal approach to documenting the victims of sexual violence and representing the importance of black women in the civil rights movement. McGuire draws emphasis towards the outspoken and bold female figures in the civil rights movement who so often have often been erased from the dominant narrative and represented as meeker or in more subordinate roles. She spares no detail as she presents and unfiltered narration of each victim of sexual and racial violence, McGuire does not forget a name or date as she brings each victim to light in such a personal and sometimes, harrowing, approach. At the Dark End of the Street centers and remembers black women and their role in the civil rights

Interracial rape could be weaponized in both directions; rape was often used to terrorize and instill fear in black women and cried falsely against black males to justify the killings and brutal lynching of black men. After the Supreme Court 's May 17, 1954 announcement on striking down segregation in public schools, Melba Patillo, a twelve year old black girl, was attacked and sexually assaulted by a white man, who proclaimed he was doing so as retaliation for the Supreme Court trying to ruin his life and how he would not stand for "niggers wanting to go to school with his children". Mae Holland, a black victim of rape, said that "in the South, no white man wanted to die without having sex with a black woman" (McGuire 203). Holland was a raped by the white husband of her employer when she was eleven, she was not even his first young black rape victim, as he was notorious for doing such. The list of black victims of rape goes on; Betty Jean Owens, Annette Buttler, June Johnson, Bessie Turner and many more black women were also suffered from racialized sexual violence and McGuire detailed each of their respective ordeals. Black women were hyper sexualized by white men and ironically; white men would not be too pleased to find black men with white women. In 1949, Mack Ingram, a