Here is the courageous, groundbreaking story of Rosa Parks and
Recy Taylor—a story that reinterprets the history of America’s
civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed
against Black women by white men.
“An important
step to finally facing the terrible legacies of race and gender in
this country.” —The Washington Post
Rosa
Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose
tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city
buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the
1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The
truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955
boycott is far different from anything previously written.
In
this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about
the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper,
Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and
praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven
white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman
into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The
president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator
and organizer—Rosa Parks—to Abbeville. In taking on this case,
Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual
assault against Black women and added fire to the growing call for
change.