The Long Walk For Justice At The Dark Side Of The Street

The Long Walk for Justice

These are 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 when white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. At the Dark Side of the Street investigates the events that led up to the civil rights movement in Alabama 1944. Such a pattern of crimes, not only against black women but against black men also, helped to stir the Civil Rights Movement. Even though the main crime toward black women was rape, the whole African-American race was raped in a sense that none were allowed certain privileges, opportunities, or justices. At the Dark Side of the Street takes us back into those dark days into a world of cover-ups, the “justice” from law enforcement, and the aftermath of such incidents.

In Abbeville, Alabama 1944 the investigation into the horrific gang-rape of Recy Taylor, a young black mother by six white assailants is one of the crimes that began with a vivid description of Recy Taylor’s rape and Rosa Parks’ investigation of the incident. After the investigation, Parks, with the help of other local Alabama black women, organized the Committee for Equal Justice, which raised money and fought for a fair prosecution of Taylor’s attackers. The Taylor case politically charged scores of African American men and women on a national level and set the stage for “sexual violence and interracial rape [to become] the battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal ...

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...ch as North Carolina native Mack Ingram in 1951 and Mississippian Mack Charles Parker in 1959, shore-up McGuire’s arguments about the centrality of sexual violence to actions of both sexes on opposite sides of the color line.

This book is giving details about what was hidden from the rest of the world, shielding us from the truth. At the Dark End of the Street describes the decades of degradation black women on the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to cook and clean for their white bosses. While sifting through court files and old trial transcripts, McGuire produced evidence that showed white on black rape was endemic in the segregated South. I felt like I had discovered a whole new civil rights movement with black women and their struggle for dignity, respect and bodily integrity at the center that is as poignant, painful and complicated as our own lives.