Civil Rights History Reframed

Danielle L. McGuire has written what she calls a "new history of the civil rights movement," one that surveys black women's resistance to sexual violence over roughly a thirty-year span, from 1944 to 1975. McGuire argues, more persuasively in some cases than others, that there was an undeniable connection between the crimes that these women endured, their individual quests for justice, and the broad historical event known as "the civil rights movement." Without question, many historians have glossed over a major experience for the era, and McGuire makes a forceful case for reevaluating histories of postwar social protest from the perspective of black women, rape, and resistance.

In rescuing this history, McGuire recasts familiar events and personalities in new and provocative ways, the most notable being the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the figure of Rosa Parks, whom McGuire concludes was a "militant race woman, a sharp detective, and antirape activist long before she became the patron saint of the bus boycott" (p. xvii). Indeed, more than a decade before her December 1, 1955 arrest, Parks offered her help to a young mother and sharecropper. On September 3, 1944, six white men—including a U.S. army private—kidnapped and raped twenty-four-year-old Recy Taylor in the small town of Abbeville, Alabama. Armed with guns and knives, the men drove her into the woods, forced her to undress ("Get them rags off") and took turns raping her. At one point, the driver ordered her to "act just like you do with your husband or I'll cut your damn throat." After brutalizing her repeatedly, they drove her back toward a main highway, where they left her to walk back to town. Dazed and humiliated, she found her way back to family, friends, and the local sheriff—at which point, according to McGuire, she performed her first act of resistance: she told what happened. One of the first individuals to document her experience was Rosa Parks, who traveled to Abbeville to interview Taylor in preparation for a collective response based in Montgomery. As secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, Parks was responsible for recording cases of discrimination and violence for the organization.

Recy Taylor's rape was a catalyst unseen in the state of Alabama. The African American community organized an all-out effort in pursuit of justice for Recy Taylor and, symbolically, for the scores of other sexually abused black women unknown to history. The auspicious response was well coordinated and full of fight and resolve. From Abbeville and Montgomery to Chicago, Harlem, and Washington, D.C., a broad coalition of labor activists, civil rights organizations, women's groups, and leftist youth formed the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. Participants raised funds, wrote letters, held mass meetings, and coordinated a national media effort to bring widespread attention to her case and force a trial. Just three months after Taylor's horrid experience, the committee had created branches in sixteen states and assembled a distinguished board that included the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell. Despite the notoriety and energy behind the committee's effort, Taylor did not receive justice. Ultimately, a grand jury failed to indict the perpetrators.

McGuire sees much significance in this neglected history. She is taken particularly by the involvement of Rosa Parks, and reasonably so. It was Parks who first interviewed Taylor and joined several others in organizing "her defense." (Like most cases of its kind, the brutal assault of Taylor turned into a case about her character and worth as a credible victim.) In an effort to center both Parks and Taylor as she narrates the story, McGuire intersperses full biographical information on Parks amid the extraordinarily compelling details of the Taylor story. Too often the activism of Parks prior to the 1955 Montgomery movement is...