At The Dark End Of The Street Analysis

Women had many different roles in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, otherwise known as SNCC, but the legacy of their roles is not as important as the debate over their treatment. The experiences of women varied greatly depending on whether the woman was black or white. Most literature examining this issue until recently was written by white women, which provided a different perspective from black women’s stories. White women had more complaints and frustrations regarding subordination compared to black women. Gender as well as race created tensions in SNCC, and these problems created foreshadowed the feminist movement.

The reading this week brought to my attention that historic events have a way of repeating themselves. In Folklore of the Freeway, Eric Avila explains that during the “Freeway Revolt” there were different ways that communities organized and the types of issues they were fighting against. These issues and organization structures mirror current day protests. Likewise, the connections between how women were treated with respect to protests during the “Freeway Revolt” and the recent Women's match are astounding. In the context of these two events, white women are seen as saints for fighting a fight that doesn’t affect them, while women of color as ridiculed for making a big deal out of nothing.

There are plenty of black men that have problems with the way society view and treat them. In the essay Black Men and Public Space, the author Brent Staples expressed how black men were perceived in the public’s eyes. He expressed this problem by giving examples of how a young man was perceived. Some of the solutions did not really solve the problem in general, but helped to change the mindset of those surrounding him.

Introduction The Civil Rights Movement, beginning in 1954 and ending in 1968, brought upon drastic change on American society and is often remembered by the great leaders of the movement such as Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Goodman, Philip Randolph, E.D Nixon and many more. Often times, however, individuals with long-lasting impacts and influences are overlooked, simply because of their gender. Numerous women have spurred the movement forward when it was at a standstill acting as leaders and activists in their communities and yet history classes skim over them or act as if they were non-existent. One such influential woman of the movement was Daisy Bates.

Dorothy Height once said, “Greatness is not measured by what a man or a women accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach these goals. ”Surely greatness came to this country once African American women stopped being disregarded and became embraced. Women were disregarded from more male jobs like becoming a doctor or a lawyer. Also women were forbade from certain colleges and weren’t taken seriously. However, some believe that an organization and one women guided the Civil Rights Movement further than any women had before.

Danielle L. McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street, “an important, original contribution to civil rights historiography”, discusses the topic of rape and sexual assault towards African American women, and how this played a major role in causing the civil rights movement (Dailey 491). Chapter by chapter, another person's story is told, from the rape of Recy Taylor to the court case of Joan Little, while including the significance of Rosa Parks and various organizations in fighting for the victims of unjust brutality. The sole purpose of creating this novel was to discuss a topic no other historian has discussed before, because according to McGuire they have all been skipping over a topic that would change the view of the civil rights movement.

I find that this example highlights the fact that while women had far less political power in society during the nineteenth century, the least the law could do was to protect the sexual integrity of women; However, African American women suffered from racial, gender and class discrimination that makes it difficult for them to prosecute those that sexually assault them. Furthermore, anger of white men were usually taken out on the wives of freed African American men and usually in the form of sexual assaults and this made the situation for African American women

African American women have fought for civil rights since the 19th century. They spoke out against slavery and racism. They established black women’s clubs to improve conditions for African Americans. They organized black consumer, supported labor unions, and worked in politics and journalism. At the height of the modern Civil Rights Movement, they were the Movement’s backbone.

This is especially true when one considers the fact that many of the the civil rights “giants” in Montgomery during that time like Dr. King were transplants from other black communities throughout the United States, not natives of the community. In reality, the Women’s Political Council paved the way for the entirety of the civil rights movement to occur as their courage, tenacity, and fearlessness actively countered the prevailing social order that blacks in Montgomery, Alabama and throughout the nation were an unfortunate participant of long before there was a national shift in public opinion on the topic of civil rights after the arrest of Rosa Parks and the emergence of the sit-in

or prosecuted and punished on trumped-up rape charges, refused to be involved in the anti-rape campaign although they had, from the time of slavery, been themselves victims of sexual violence from their white masters. Thus the anti-rape movement proceeded without the support of some of the worst victims of sexual violence. This reinforces the logic of Davis ' entire critique of the feminist movement in America and shows that the gender-based homogeneity assumed by feminists is con- stantly undercut not merely as a result of the internalisation of male supremacist ideology by women but by the objective need to give pri- ority to racial solidarity within a specific historical situation, because here racial solidarity, at least to some extent,

The theory of intersectionality has been growing and developing for hundreds of years. This theory suggests that women are more than just their gender; that they have all of these different underlying identities, oppressions, and privileges that have influenced who they are as an individual. While the concept may still be new to many individuals, Black feminist thinkers everywhere for years, have been struggling to have their voices and opinions heard about how their lives are more than just their gender, that they are more than simply one single issue. By tracing back throughout history and looking at how these black feminists thinkers developed their theories and ideas, only then can one fully try to understand the whole concept and importance

Although, Donna Murch article informs briefly about the history of the Black Power movement, it also emphasized the ideology supported or opposed by the black power movement. As Donna Murch states, “Many of the ideas generated in the Association, including their debates about the nature of identity, African retention, and the integrationist sins of the Black middle class, anticipated cultural nationalist thought of subsequent years” (339), it proves again how the black power opposed integration and adhered to the black nationalism ideology, which eventually differed from the civil rights

Issues concerning “white feminism” often include things like the denunciation of rape culture, and equal pay for equal work. It may be said that my argument that “the only thing that matters is gender” effectively erases or ignores the struggles of women in a minority while effectively promoting a singular way of viewing both feminism and patriarchy. While I already addressed that race does, in fact, have a role in patriarchal hierarchy; the role of “white feminism” is often misconstrued. The

Patricia Hill Collins’ “Black Feminist Thought” discussed the importance and power of the black feminist thought and black feminist critique, what she called the “matrix of domination”. Collins argued the critiques offered two main contributions: (1) they provided another way of looking at oppression through an intersectional lens, and (2) black feminist thought acknowledges and centers around the voices of black women, even in a field of predominantly white scholars. She argued that a subordinate group experiences a different reality than a dominant group and interprets that reality different than them; it is the connection of what a person does and what he or she thinks. This idea reminds me of how a dominant group, Whites, make assumptions about a subordinate group’s, Blacks, life experiences. Whites cannot explain those experiences of Blacks simply because they are the one group who caused the pain and suffering of Blacks, what they have experienced and are experiencing, from acts of discrimination, stereotyping, and prejudice.

In a compelling, deeply passionate, and open novel by Danielle McGuire, she sheds light on black women involvement and how pivotal their stories are on raising awareness on sexual violence throughout history in her book titled “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.” Not only does this book focuses on the truth about Black women’s suffrages, but it also sheds light on Rosa Parks huge contribution to this matter years before the infamous bus protest. Lastly, the book showcases how white men used violence on black women to prolong white supremacy to stay