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

I have owned 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 for a long time, but I was not exactly eager to read a book about rape. After reading Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, 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 was sunny in comparison because at least when racism and obvious hypocrisy are involved, and no one is pretending to be your friend, it is more likely for survivors to speak out and get the support of her community regardless of respectability politics. Or at least it WAS.
I think that when I decided to read the book was also fortuitous in the light of what happened in McKinley, TX. It is interesting that the tradition of state authority and implicit sexualized violence against black girls/women continues today. I hope that an unfortunate symptom of progress and integration is NOT that the black community will adopt Missoula standards of victim blaming or caring more about the perpetrator’s future than the victim’s need for justice. The black community, including the church, was ahead of its time when it asserted that women had a right to be protected from sexualized violence despite the justice system not being blind and still fought each battle using our imperfect system at a time when lynching and violent backlash was a normal response. 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 recontextualizes the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other notable moments in the Civil Rights Movement to remind us that the fight against Jim Crow was a fight started by black women to protect black women from sexual violence. 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 is a must read, and if it has one flaw, it is that there are not enough details about each person’s life and what happened to them.