'At the Dark End Of The Street' by Danielle McGuire (ISBN - 9780307269065) - Book Report/Review Example

At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire: Review: In the book At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle McGuire has freshly reviewed the facts, events and tensions that became a fundamental cause of the commencement of the Civil Rights Movement. In the book, McGuire has emphasized that the white men used sexual violence as a terrifying tool against the black women in particular, and the whole black community in general. An in-depth analysis of the activities and underlying concerns of such historic names as Rosa Paks, Ralph Abernathy, and Luther Martin King Jr suggests that the civil rights got driven not only by a need to acknowledge the rights of the black community, but also by a need to protect the women of the black community against violent attacks and sexual harassment that they were offered by white men at that time.

In this book, McGuire has portrayed several unique aspects of the civil rights activists who have commonly been talked of as compliant and modest people that were caught up in the historic wave. McGuire, in this book, has disapproved such a visualization of the civil rights activists and asserts that their activities were meaningful and played a big role in the civil rights movement. They were passionate about earning the black community their rights that were long subdued by the white men. The book adequately throws light upon the various ways in which black women were humiliated in the Montgomery city buses when they went to serve their white employers.

McGuire has discussed the rape of a 24 years old mother named Recy Taylor that happened in 1944. On her way to home, Taylor was harassed by 7 white men that were equipped with weapons and killing tools. The men pushed Taylor into their car, raped her and later, pushed her out of the car. At that time, Rosa Parks was sent by the local NAACP branch office president in order to investigate the matter. After conducting a thorough investigation of the case, Parks initiated a movement that brought about a big revolution in the world by refusing to get up from the bus seat in 1955.

Parks emphasized upon the need to protest and deemed the bus seat as the right place for her to protest through (McGuire, 2010). Because of the display of such an attitude, she was arrested. The protest gave rise to a yearlong struggle. The truths about Rosa Parks and the underlying causes of the bus boycott in 1955 are things, not many authors other than McGuire have explored. There is no doubt in the fact that many black people including Mary Smith and Claudette Colvin got arrested for the same reason as Rosa Parks, though McGuire portrayed Rosa Parks as an unusually daring woman particularly as she had refused to spare her seat despite the enormous pressure that she had been subjected to 0n 1 December 1955.

The way McGuire has documented Rosa Park’s activism is wonderful and is too appealing for the reader to think otherwise. This book makes an important addition to the existing body of literature about civil rights movement. The way commencement of the civil rights movement has been explained in this book has not been done before. McGuire asserts that the sexual violence offered to black women by the white men was a fundamental driving force behind the initiation of the civil rights movement.

The white men tended to make use of economic intimidation and terror in an attempt to ruin the freedom movement. The social injustice continued to prevail all along the Jim Crow era and rights of the black women remained subdued on racial grounds, though they kept on protesting. Ultimately, the protests made by black women ignited the civil rights movement allover the South as the Second World War was in progress. The campaigns gained strength till they initiated the Black Power movement. The book At the Dark End of the Street has accomplished two fundamental goals.

First, the book has sufficiently explained and provided proof for the fact that the activities of the black women were purposeful and that they were real feminists in the country. The book has emphasized that black women had to struggle to get their identity acknowledged since they had long been exposed to sexual violence. Secondly, the book speaks of the power of unity of the black men and black women. It may apparently seem too simple to discuss, though there is a need to realize the strength of unity as it is required in the present age.

References: McGuire, D. At the Dark End Of The Street' by Danielle McGuire. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.