In a supposedly solitary, spontaneous act, Rosa Parks sparked the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which gave birth to the civil rights movement. Parks is often described as an unassuming woman whose fatigue caused her to defy the Jim Crow laws. The truth of who she was and what really started the boycott is far different, and, until now, unwritten . . . In this groundbreaking book, Danielle L. McGuire brilliantly reinterprets the history of Americars"s civil rights movement in terms of the ritualistic rape and sexualized violence that for almost three hundred years had been perpetrated against black women. She looks at the crucial role played by African American women, at people like Rosa Parks, already a seasoned antirape activist more than a decade before the bus boycott, who turned a one-day protest on the buses into a three-decade war against white supremacy that changed the world. At the Dark End of the Streetis a revelation-and certain to be one of the most talked about books of the year.
