Transcripts For CSPAN3 Book Discussion On At The Dark End Of

That is what we have been told up till now. But do we really know rosa parks . The answer according to our guest this evening is very definitely, no. We welcome to the center for the book tonight, dr. Danielle mcguire, assistant professor of history at Wayne State University in detroit. Her new book is at the dark end of the street black women, rape, and resistance. A new history of the Civil Rights Movement from rosa parks through the rise of black power. As her subtitle suggests, the book does not not merely shed new light on rosa parks and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, it offers us nothing less than a new way of approaching an understanding both the womens history and the underpinnings of the Civil Rights Movement. It is a scholarly yet riveting narrative that traces a sordid history of Sexual Violence directed against black women in the jim crow era and illuminates how the littleknown actions of rosa parks long before that bus boycott helped create the impetus for Civil Rights Movements. Historian Nell Irvin Painter says that dr. Maguires book details the all too ignored tactic of rape of black women in the everyday practice of southern White Supremacy. Just as important, she plots resistance against this outrage as an integral fact of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Her book is as essential as its history is infuriating. Please join me in welcoming dr. Danielle maguire. [applause] danielle thank you so much. Thank you especially to the Georgia Center for the book for inviting me and the Decatur Public Library for hosting us, and to all of you for bearing with me through this presentation. I am thrilled that you are here tonight. In 1944, in abbeville, alabama, a black woman named recy taylor walked home from a church revival. A car load of white men kidnapped her off the street, drove her to the woods, and brutally gang raped her. When they finished, they dropped her in the middle of town and threatened to kill her if she told anyone what happened. But that night she told her father, her husband, and the local sheriff the details of the brutal assault. A few days later, the montgomery naacp said they were sending their very best investigator. Her name was rosa parks. It was 11 years before the montgomery bus boycott. And 11 years later, this group of homegrown activists would become better known as the montgomery improvement association, vaunting its president , dr. Martin luther king jr. , to International Prominence and launching a movement that would ultimately change the world. Rosa parks carried recy taylors story back to montgomery, where she and the most militant activists organized a national and international protest for equal justice for mrs. Recy taylor. The chicago defender called it the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade. But when this coalition took root, it would become the montgomery improvement association, dr. King was still in high school. The 1955 montgomery bus boycott, often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights drama, was in many ways the last act of a decadeslong struggle to protect africanamerican women like recy taylor from sexualized violence and rape. The kidnapping and rape of recy taylor was not unusual in the segregated south. From slavery through the better part of the 20th century, white men abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity and often impunity. They lured black women and girls away from work with promises of steady pay and better wages. They attacked them on the job. They abducted them at gunpoint while traveling to or from home or work or church. They sexually humiliated, harassed, and assaulted them on buses, in theaters and other places of public space. This was a pattern throughout the south during the 1940s and 1950s and it underscore the limits of southern justice. But black women did not keep their stories secret. They reclaim their humanity by testifying about these brutal assaults, and their testimonies often led to larger campaigns for civil rights and human dignity. In fact even the most oft told and illustrious campaigns for civil rights, montgomery, birmingham, selma, the 1964 freedom summer in mississippi they often have an unexamined history of gendered political appeals to protect black women from Sexual Violence. Now, most of you here tonight probably know something about the montgomery bus boycott. According to popular history, who and what caused the boycott . Anyone. Rosa parks. What was it about rosa parks . What caused her to defy the rules on the bus . She was tired. Thats right. She had tired feet. When asked the same question, joe azbell, the former editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, talked about somebody else, Gertrude Perkins. This is what he had to say. Gertrude perkins is not even mentioned in the history books. But she had as much to do with the bus boycott and its creation as anyone on earth. Danielle now, Gertrude Perkins loomed large enough in azbells mind to remember her 40 years after the fact when he gave this interview. Yet most histories of the bus boycott fail to even mention her name. And if you are anything like me, when hearing this, you are like who the heck is Gertrude Perkins . Well, Gertrude Perkins was an africanamerican woman, 25 years old, who was abducted and assaulted by two White Montgomery Police Officers on march 27, 1949. Ill let reverend solomon seay senior explain what happened that night. Two policemen picked her up on the railroad. They had all types of sex relations with her at that particular time. When they put her out, she came to my door. She told me what had happened to her. I sat down and wrote what she said had happened to her. Word by word. When she had finished, i had it notarized and sent it to drew pearson in washington. And drew pearson went to the air with it. What Gertrude Perkins said happened to her was all over the nation. After Gertrude Perkins told reverend seay what happened, she somehow mustered the courage to report the crime to the police, perhaps even the same men who had raped her. Not surprisingly, the police dismissed her claim and accused her of lying. The mayor claimed perkins charge was completely false. And he said holding a lineup or issuing any warrants would set a bad precedent. Besides, he said, my policemen would not do a thing like that. But blacks in montgomery knew better. Montgomerys police force had a reputation for racist and sexist brutality. In fact just a few years earlier, police had abducted and raped the 16yearold daughter of a black woman who challenged a Police Officer on a bus one day. As word of the attack on Gertrude Perkins spread, club women, naacp activists, labor leaders and ministers rallied to her defense. They formed an Umbrella Organization called the Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins and they demanded an investigation and a trial. Their public protests garnered enough attention to keep the story on the front pages of the white daily newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, for nearly two months. The sustained attention finally forced a grand jury hearing where Gertrude Perkins testified on her own behalf. The county solicitor swore at her and accused her of lying. But she stood her ground and maintained her composure. Her brave testimony did not impact the allwhite allmale jury, however, who failed to indict any of the officers. In an editorial designed to put any hard feelings to rest, the Montgomery Advertiser said, the case ran the full process of our anglosaxon system of justice. What more could have been done . Well, members of the Citizens Committee would have preferred an indictment and a lengthy jail sentence, but they were thrilled with the amount of public protest that their campaign had yielded. But montgomery seemed to have more of its fair share of what roy wilkins called sex cases. In fact, the recy taylor and Gertrude Perkins cases did not occur in isolation. In february 1951, a White Grocery store owner named sam green raped a black teenager named flossie hartman. Green had employed her as a babysitter and frequently drove her home after her shifts. One night, he pulled to the side of a quiet road and raped her. That night, she went home and told her parents what happened. They decided to press charges. When an allwhite jury delivered a not guilty verdict after deliberating for only five minutes, the family reached out to rufus lewis, a world war ii veteran and celebrated football coach at Alabama State university. Lewis, along with edie nixon, who was head of the montgomery naacp, organized a campaign to boycott greens store. They brought together womens groups like the womens Political Council and labor unions, perhaps even the same people who had organized to defend recy taylor. After only a few weeks, African Americans delivered their own verdict in the case by driving green into the red. They shut down greens Grocery Store. And that ability to shut down his Grocery Store constituted a major victory. Not only did it establish the boycott as a powerful weapon for justice, but it also sent a message to whites that africanamericans would no longer allow white men to disrespect, abuse, and violate black womens bodies. Besides Police Officers, few were as guilty of these crimes as were the citys bus operators, who bullied and brutalized black passengers daily. Worse, bus drivers had police powers. They carried blackjacks, and often guns. And they assaulted and sometimes even killed africanamericans who violated the racial order of jim crow. In 1953 alone, africanamericans filed over 30 complaints of abuse and mistreatment on the buses. Most of these complaints came from black women, mostly workingclass women who were domestics, who made up the bulk of the Montgomery City lines ridership. Drivers hurled nasty sexualized insults at black women, touched them inappropriately and often physically abused them. One woman remembered bus drivers sexually harassing her as she waited on the corner. The bus was up high, she said, and the street was down low. They would drive up and expose themselves while i was just standing there. It scared me to death. Another remembered they treated black women just as rough as can be, like were some kind of animal. They denied black women a sense of dignity and demonstrated they were not worthy of respect or protection. This belief was part of a longstanding pattern that allowed white men to use and abuse black women for the better part of even the 20th century. When we consider this within a spectrum of racial and Sexual Violence with rape and lynching on one end, and these daily indignities on the other, attacks on black womens bodily integrity underscored both their physical and their sexual vulnerability in a racial caste system. So it was much easier not to mention safer for black women to just stop riding the buses than it was to bring their assailants, often bus drivers and Police Officers, to justice. Without these women, the bus boycott would have failed. Africanamerican women ran the daytoday operation of the boycott. They helped stop the elaborate carpool system that kept the boycott running. They raised most of the local money for the movement. They filled the majority of pews at the mass meetings where they testified publicly about physical and sexual abuse on the buses. By walking hundreds of miles to protest humiliation, africanamerican women reclaimed their bodies and demanded to be treated with dignity and respect. And so while the montgomery bus boycott is often portrayed as a spontaneous and often maleled movement, its important to know that the montgomery bus boycott has a past. It is rooted in the struggle to protect and defend black womanhood from racial and Sexual Violence. And i think its impossible for us to understand and situate the boycott in its proper Historical Context without understanding the stories of recy taylor and Gertrude Perkins, and the others who were mistreated. In fact, without this history, its impossible for us to understand why so many black women walked for so long to protest mistreatment on the buses. Now montgomery was not the only place where attacks on black women fueled protests against White Supremacy. Civil rights campaigns in little rock, arkansas, where daisy bates, the heroine of the Little Rock School desegration campaign, had used her newspaper for a decade to publicly shame white men who assaulted black women, or albany, georgia in 1962, where local people defended black women at Albany State College from white men who frequently broke into their dorms and prowled around campus at night. Or birmingham and selma, alabama in the early 1960s, whose police and bus drivers were notorious for their racist and sexist practices. Or mississippi during the 1964 freedom summer, where black women activists who were arrested were often beaten and sexually abused while they were in prison. All of these Major Campaigns have roots in organized resistance to sexualized violence and gendered political appeals to defend black womanhood. All of this despite a growing body of literature that focuses on the roles of black and white women and the operation of gender in the movement, and now scenes of rape play little or no role in most histories of the African American freedom struggle, even as we focused on racist violence against black and white men like emmett till. And goodman and schwarner and cheney. All of these provide gripping examples of racist brutality, but we ignore what happened to black women. In order to truly understand the Civil Rights Movement, we need to understand these stories, we need to understand this history. The Sexual Exploitation of black women of course had its roots in slavery. Slaveowners stolen access to black womens bodies strengthened their political, their social, and their economic power for two reasons. One, colonial laws made the offspring of slave women the property of their master, giving slave owners a financial incentive to abuse their slaves. And two, colonial laws that banned interracial marriage but not fornication or childbirth out of wedlock awarded white men exclusive sexual access to black and white women while denying black women the respectability and rights granted by a legal relationship. These laws created a system that allowed white men to police white womens sexual choices and marital choices, and sexually abuse black women with impunity. Both of which maintained white mens position on top of the political and economic power structure. After slavery fell, these practices often remained. For example, during reconstruction, former slaveholders and their sympathizers used violence to reassert control over freed people. Rape became a weapon of terror and interracial rape became a battleground upon which black men and women fought for ownership and control of their very own bodies. Interracial rape was deployed as a justification for lynching black men who violated any aspect of the racial status quo, even though they were often accused of attacking white women. In order to maintain power and control, whites created the myth of the black beast rapist, the incubus, portraying them as a beast that attacked white women while they slept. And they used this image whenever they feared losing power. For example, white democrats in North Carolina used the image of the incubus in 1900 to regain political control after the biracial fusion party took every single statewide office in 1898. Black club women like ida b. Wells, who led the crusade against lynching in the 1890s, argued that white men accused black men of rape as part of a larger system of intimidation. Worse, she argued, they did this to mask their own barbarism and attacks on black women. She knew that white men attacked black women in an almost ritualistic fashion throughout the jim crow era. Now, black women were victimized to be sure. But at the dark end of the street is not just about victimization. Many black women who were raped or assaulted fought back by speaking out. From the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs to ida b. Wells to Gertrude Perkins, africanamerican women described and denounced their sexual misuse, deploying their voices as weapons in the wars against White Supremacy. But for every woman that spoke out, there were undoubtedly many more who kept these brutal attacks to themselves. And silence could be a useful strategy. Especially when whites used racist violence and sexual abuse to shore up White Supremacy. For example, africanamerican leaders embraced the po