Atthe Dark End of the Street
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
I Atthe Dark End I of the Street Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History ofthe Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise ofBlack Power Danielle 1. McGuire 0 VINTAGE BOOKS A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. NEW YORK For Recy and Ruby FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2011 Sex is the principle around which the whole Copyright © 2010 by Danielle L. McGuire structure of segregati6n . is organized. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, . a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by —GUNNAR MYRDAL I Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010. Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. A portion of this work was originally published in slightly different form in Thejournal ofAmerican History. The Library of Congress cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: McGuire, Danielle L. At the dark end of the street I by Danielle L. McGuire. — ist ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. I . African-American women—Civil rights—Alabama—History—2oth century. 2. African-American women—Violence against—Alabama—History—2oth century. 3 . Rape—Political aspects—Southern States—History—2oth century. 4. Civil rights movements—Southern States—History—2oth century. Southern 5 . States—Race relations—History—2oth century. I. Title. E185.61.M4777 2010 323.1196’0730761—dc22 2010012072 Vintage ISBN: 978-0-307-38924-4 Book design by Maggie Hinders www.vintagebooks.com Printed in the United States of America IC 9 8 7 6 4 3 2 I I Prologue 1944, Rock Hill Holiness Church, in ON SEPTEMBER 3 , the Abbeville, Alabama, rocked late into the night. It was nearly mid- night when the doors of the wooden, one-story church swung open releasing streams of worshippers, all African American, into the moonlight. After a night of singing and praying, Recy Taylor, Fan- me Daniel, and Daniel’s eighteen-year-old son, West, stepped out of the country chapel and strolled toward home alongside the peanut plantations that bounded the Abbeville-Headland highway. Taylor, a slender, copper-colored, and beautiful twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, noticed a rattletrap green Chevrolet pass them at least three times, young white men gawking from its windows. “You reckon what they are up to?” Taylor asked. Taylor and Daniel, a stout sixty-one-year-old woman, watched the car creep by one last time and roll to a stop a few feet ahead of them. Seven men, armed with knives and guns, got out of the car and walked toward the women. Herbert Lovett, the oldest of the crew at twenty-four and a pri vate in the U.S. Army, shouted, “Halt!” When they ignored the order, Lovett leveled his shotgun. West tugged at his mother’s sleeve, begging her to stop. “They might shoot you,” he whispered. PROLOGUE xvii xvi PROLOGUE gun at Taylor. Sobbing, Taylor pulled off her clothes. As the circle of men closed in, Lovett waved his that cut “Please,” she cried, “let me go home to my husband and my baby.” “We’re looking for this girl, right there. She’s the one said, adding that Lovett spread an old hunting coat on the ground, told his that white boy in Clopton this evening,” Lovett the group to friends to strip down to their socks and undershirts, and ordered the local sheriff, George H. Gamble, had dispatched Taylor to lie down. Lovett passed his rifle to a friend and took off find the alleged assailant. all day.” his pants. Hovering over the young mother, he snarled, “Act just . “You’re wrong,” Fannie insisted. “She’s been to my house agreement. like you do with your husband or I’ll cut your damn throat.” The men crowded closer, nodding their heads in “Ain’t this her?” Lovett asked. her by the “Yep, this the one,” Joe Culpepper said. “I know Lovett was the first of six men to rape Taylor that night. When clothes she got on.” they finished, someone helped her get dressed, tied a handkerchief “That’s her,” Luther Lee agreed. “Get her!” Then he over her eyes, and shoved her back into the car. Back on the high- Lovett lurched toward Taylor and grabbed her arm. way, the men stopped and ordered Taylor out of the car. “Don’t turned to West and asked ifTaylor was his wife. Unde move until we get away from here,” one of them yelled. Taylor “No,” West replied, “she’s Willie Guy Taylor’s wife.” him to heard the car disappear into the night. She pulled off the blind- terred, Lovett extended his hand to the teenager, ordered fold, got her bearings, and began the long walk home.3 shake it, and promised not to hurt Taylor. knows “We’re going to take her up here and see if Mr. Gamble right back.” her,” Lovett claimed. “ffshe’s not the one, we’ll bring her from his A few days later, a telephone rang at the NAACP branch office in As Lovett spoke, Taylor managed to wrest her arm Montgomery, Alabama. E. D. Nixon, the local president, promised grasp and bolted toward a stand of trees behind a cabin.’ to shoot to send his best investigator to Abbeville. That investigator would “Come back! Come back!” Fannie yelled. “They going launch a movement that would ultimately change the world. you. Come back!”2 of her Her name was Rosa Parks.4 “Stop!” Lovett shouted. He cocked the gun at the back head. “I’ll kill you ifyou run.” back- Lovett walked Taylor to the car and shoved her into the squeezed In later years, historians would paint Parks as a sweet and reti seat. Three men piled in behind her, while four others crept away. cent old woman, whose tired feet caused her to defy Jim Crow into the front. The headlights switched off and the car highway, on Montgomery’s city buses. Her solitary and spontaneous act, After a few miles, the green sedan turned off the main stopped the story goes, sparked the 1955 bus boycott and gave birth to rattled down a red-clay tractor path into the woods, and Mr. Gam the civil rights movement. But Rosa Parks was a militant race in a grove of pecan trees. “Y’all aren’t carrying me to her wrists woman, a sharp detective, and an antirape activist long before she ble,” Taylor shouted. The men in the backseat clasped and waved became the patron saint of the bus boycott. After meeting with and ordered her to be quiet. Lovett grabbed his gun Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks helped form the Committee for Equal Taylor and his companions out of the car. at her, Justice. With support from local people, she helped organize what “Get them rags off,” he barked, pointing the shotgun the Chicago Defender called the “strongest campaign for equal jus “or I’ll kill you and leave you down here in the woods.” xviii PROLOGUE PROLOGUE xix tice to be seen in a decade. “ Eleven years later this group of home- economic hierarchy; sexually humiliated and assaulted them on grown leaders would become better known as the Montgomery streetcars and buses, in taxicabs and trains, and in other public Improvement Association. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, spaces. As the acclaimed freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer put often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights movement, it, “A black woman’s body was neverhers “ was in many ways the last act of a decades-long struggle to protect Black women did not keep their stories secret. African-American black women, like Taylor, from sexualized violence and rape. women reclaimed their bodies and their humanity by testifring about their assaults. They launched the first public attacks on sex- iia.l violence as a “systemic abuse of women” in response to slavery The kidnapping and rape of Recy Taylor was not unusual in the and the wave of lynchings in the post-Emancipation South.9 Slave segregated South. The sexual exploitation of black women by narratives offer stark testimony about the brutal sexual exploita white men had its roots in slavery and continued throughout the tion bondswomen faced. For example, Harriet Jacobs detailed her better part of the twentieth century. master’s lechery in her autobiography to “arouse the women of the When African Americans tested their freedom during Recon North” and “convince the people of the Free States what Slavery ‘° struction, former slaveholders and their sympathizers used rape really is. “ When African-American clubwomen began to organize as a “weapon of terror” to dominate the bodies and minds of antilynching campaigns during the late nineteenth century, they African-American men and women.5 Interracial rape was not only testified about decades ofsexual us’ , On October 5 , I 892 hun- used to uphold white patriarchal power but was also deployed as a dreds ofblack women converged on Lyric Hall in New York City to justification for lynching black men who challenged the Southern hear Ida B. Wells’s thunderous voice. While black men were being status quo. In addition to the immediate physical danger African accused ofravishing white women, she argued, “The rape ofhelpless Americans faced, sexual and racial violence functioned as a tool of Negro girls, which began in slavery days, still continues without coercion, control, and harassment.6 Ida 13. Wells, the gun-toting reproof from church, state or press.”2 At the i 893 World’s Fair editor of the Memphis Free Press who led a crusade against lynching in Chicago, Fannie Barrier Williams told an audience of black and in the i 8905, argued that white men accused black men of rape as white clubwomen about the “shameful fact that I am constantly in part of a larger “system of intimidation” designed to keep blacks receipt ofletters from the still unprotected women ofthe South “subservient and submissive.” Worse, Wells argued at the turn of Anna Julia Cooper, a Washington, D.C., educator, author, and the century, white men used the protection of white womanhood respected clubwoman, echoed Williams’s testimony.