Danielle L. McGuire: At the Dark End of the Street

Danielle L. McGuire’s book At The Dark End of the Street, subtitled Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, looks at the role of black women’s resistance to sexual violence at the hands of white men in the history of the civil rights movement. As she notes in her Introduction:

“And yet analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement, which present it as a struggle between black and white men—the heroic leadership of Martin Luther King confronting intransigent white supremacists like “Bull” Connor. The real story—that the civil rights movement is also rooted in African-American women’s long struggle against sexual violence—has never before been written. The stories of black women who fought for bodily integrity and personal dignity hold profound truths about the sexualized violence that marked racial politics and African American lives during the modern civil rights movement. If we understand the role rape and sexual violence played in African Americans’ daily lives and within the larger freedom struggle, we have to reinterpret, if not rewrite, the history of the civil rights movement.”

In her landmark book, McGuire focuses on the history of black women and sexual violence in Montgomery, Alabama - the home of icon and activist Rosa Parks and in some ways the birthplace of the civil rights movement in the South - where in 1944, Recy Taylor’s speaking out about her rape made headlines and brought Parks, then a NAACP worker, to nearby Abbeville to investigate the case. Using Montgomery as a case study for her thesis, McGuire follows the stories of sexual violence and the response of the black community, particularly black women - but she makes it clear that Montgomery is hardly an anomaly, that such race-based sexual violence was and is endemic in America.

“Montgomery, Alabama, was not the only place in which attacks on black women fueled protests against white supremacy. Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and many other places had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood.”

While her focus in examining black activism in response to sexual violence is on the harassment and rape of black women, uncounted numbers of whom were victims of white men who were never punished, McGuire does not ignore the way that accusations of gendered violence were used against black men, thousands of whom were falsely accused of offenses against white women and, if they escaped lynching, found it nearly impossible to convince the courts of their innocence.

However, her central narrative is clear in connecting the growing outrage at the numerous incidents of black women abducted and raped by white men with the impetus to activism. Years before the assault on Recy Taylor, the cause of the Scottsboro nine - nine black youths convicted of raping two white women - brought together black civil rights activists and white progressives to fight for justice; Taylor’s case galvanised protest and resulted in the formation of organisations whose activities would expand and persist.

Despite their best efforts, it proved impossible to win convictions against Taylor’s rapists, who either denied their involvement, or alleged that she was a known prostitute whom they had paid. But the movement went on to take up the cases of other black women, and to broadcast information about these assaults across the country.

Aside from entrenched racism and the belief that the rape of black women was not really a crime, the progressives and activists involved in fighting for equal justice faced serious opposition from another direction: the cold war fear of Communist ‘infiltrtion’ and McCarthyism. Many of those, white and black, who took up the cause of equal justice for blacks were, or had t one time been, involved in groups that the government had identified as communist. In some cases, so many members of civil rights organisations were also linked to socialist or communist groups, that the FBI considered them as Communist fronts. This led to their civil rights positions and actions being discounted as Russian propaganda intended to destabilise and discredit the U.S.

Yet on the other hand, the post-war era had seen many black veterans returning from the theatres in Europe and the Pacific, changed by their participation in the war against fascism. These former soldiers “...returned home with a new sense of pride and purpose and often led campaigns for citizenship rights, legal equality, and bodily integrity. In small towns and cities across the South, black veterans became the “shock troops” of an emerging civil rights movement.”

In the mythology of the civil rights movement, the spark is Rosa Park’s refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus. Parks is often portrayed as a woman who simply was too tired, and snapped one day. In reality, the organising had begun years before, around the far more complex issue of violence against blacks, and particularly sexual violence against black women. McGuire draws the connections between this focus and the bus protests. Most working black women could not afford cars; to get to their places of work - many were domestic workers who lived far from the homes of their employers - they had to ride the buses. But the indignities did not end at having to sit at the back of the bus. Black people were often subjected to verbal and physical assault for the slightest indication of disrespect. They could be required to pay at the front, then get off and board at the rear doors - unless the bus driver decided to drive off without them. Bus drivers sometimes beat black riders who sat in the wrong seats, or refused to get up and move further back, or get off if a seat was needed for a white person. The buses were a site of white violence toward blacks.

McGuire’s narrative of the Montgomery bus boycott, and other actions undertaken during the civil rights era to bring public pressure to bear on the rampant discrimination and racism of the Southern US, restore to its place the forgotten role of black women. Parks was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat or defend herself in court; she was just the first woman with a sufficiently impeccable reputation to risk a national news event on. Much of the organising and fundraising during the boycott was done by women. Women organised car pools and drove cars. And in the thousands, women walked, or shared rides, rather than break the boycott, in the face of daiky threats and abuse. Women were charged and arrested for their roles in the boycott, but the media narrative focused on the male ministers, and above all, on the charismatic young Martin Luther King Jr. in making him the hero of the movement, the work of black women was pushed into shadows.

Women were active, organising, marching, working on voter registration, desegregating lunch counters and schools, their work and courage the backbone of the civil rights movement. Women like Jo Ann Robinson and Fannie Lou Hamer gave tirelessly of their energy and time in the movement. Like the men, they risked harassment, loss of employment, beatings, jail, destructions of property snd homes through vandalism and arson, and death. They also risked sexual intimidation, humiliation and rape.

McGuire spares the reader none of the details of the brutal acts that shored up white supremacy, the beatings, rapes, torturings, deliberate mutilations, and murders of black men, women and children for the slightest of imagined offences against the “proper order” of society, for being “uppity” or indeed for no reason at all other than the fear, insecurity and rage of white people. McGuire writes about the civil rights era, the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, but the reader cannot forget, as the horrifying images emerge from the page, that the violence continues.

Gwyneth Jones: Proof of Concept

Gwyneth Jones’s novella Proof of Concept is a densely packed narrative, weaving multiple thematic threads together into a single coherent story. The protagonist, a young woman named Kir, was chosen from a life of brutal poverty to be the host to an AI called Altair - serving as the biological platform for a software too complex to run solely on inanimate hardware. That brutal life was the result of being an outsider, a ‘scav,’ in a world ruined by ecological collapse leading to a severe population crisis. This post-climate-change earth has dead oceans and limited agricultural land, vast areas of the planet’s are unlivable and most of humanity survives - just barely - in crowded cities known as hives. The dream is The Great Escape - a way out of the solar system, to inhabit a new, fresh world.

Dan Orsted is known as the Great Popularizer. He creates Very Long Duration Training Missions in which groups of potential space explorers simulate interstellar travel conditions - while the world watches, the newest version of reality television. Margarethe Patel is a physicist working on the theory of instantaneous travel.

The Needle is an experimental space travel device built in a deep chasm. Here a group of Patel’s scientists and Orsted’s LDM reality star colonists will spend a year in isolation while Patel’s team works on the problem of directing instantaneous travel. They already know they can send the Needle out, and bring it back - now they need to find out how to find out where it goes, and eventually make it go where they want.

At first, it seems to be working well. There’s some interpersonal discomfort - friction is a bad word in the intensely social society of the hives - between the mostly driven an introverted scientists and the determinedly gregarious media stars, but nothing serious.

Then one of the scientists dies. A few months later, another. And shortly after that, another. All older, with known health issues, but still it doesn’t feel right to Kir. Meanwhile, Kir has suddenly started to ‘hear’ Altair speaking to her. The first thing he does is ask her to check certain offline data, data which, if she understands correctly, means that solving the instantaneous travel problem is much closer than she believed it to be, that they have ‘proof of concept’ - but Patel hasn’t told anyone yet. And then her casual lover, oe of the LDM personnel, is brutally murdered.

Proof of Concept is a heavily layered mystery, tightly plotted, with deceptions and evasions on almost all sides, as Kir struggles to find out what is really going inside the Needle Project. By the time she finds out, it is too late for the characters to do anything except accept the challenge to survive. What’s left for the reader is to consider the morality of certain acts in the face of extinction of not just humanity, but all things on the Earth.

Jones never gives easy answers in her fiction. Proof of Concept is no exception.

Lawrence Hill: The Illegal

Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal is a complex, fast-paced novel that explores issues of race and the movement of refugees across borders, wrapped up in the form of a thriller, set in two imagined countries that stand in for the third world of the oppressed and disadvantaged people of colour who become refugees, and the privileged Western countries where white people accumulate wealth off the oppression of other nations.

“Keita had studied maps, and he knew that Zantoroland—only one hundred kilometres long and eighty wide—was but a speck in the Ortiz Sea in the Indian Ocean. Africa to the west and Australia to the east were far too distant to be seen, but Keita knew they were there. Looking down Blossom Street, Keita could see the port and the waters of the Ortiz Sea. There were fifteen hundred kilometres of open water stretching north to the nation of Freedom State. Like all schoolchildren, Keita knew that Freedom State had enslaved Zantorolanders for some two centuries but, after abolishing slavery, had deported most black people back to Zantoroland. Ever since that time, adventurous Zantorolanders had braved the Ortiz Sea in fishing boats, taking their lives into their hands as they tried to slip back into Freedom State, one of the richest nations in the world.”

Hill’s protagonist, Keita Ali, is a black man from Zontoroland, a brutal dictatorship, rife with intertribal power struggles, violence and corruption. From his childhood, he has wanted to be a distance runner. He has trained himself for it, through the violence he witnesses as a child, through the military coup, through the death of his mother, through the detainment and torture of his dissident journalist father, through the departure of his brilliant sister to be educated safely in a foreign country. He gains the attention of a second-rate sports agent from Freedom State.

When his father is killed, he uses the agent’s interest in him to get to Freedom State, and then he runs. Without passport or papers, he is an Illegal in a country that has a policy of hunting down and deporting all undocumented residents, Keita is alone, and hunted.

When he enters a marathon and wins it, not only does he draw unwanted attention to himself, he becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a young Freedom State citizen secretly deported to Zantoroland and murdered there, a mystery that also connects him to Viola, a black, disabled reporter, John Falconer, young man of mixed race who wants to become a journalist, and a number of other people from the Minister of Immigration to the woman who runs the black shantytown known as AfricTown. Worse, his sister Charity has been lured back to Zonotoroland and the government, having located him through the news stories about his race victory, are demanding money for her safe release from detention. And the agent he ran out on is threatening to have him deported unless he buys out his contract.

Every contact he makes places him in jeopardy because of his status as an illegal. The pretty runner he beds once and tries to avoid because she’s a cop. The elderly woman with the vindictive grasping son who offers him a place to stay in return for some housekeeping chores. The banker who cannot open an account for him without identification he does not have. Everything is a risk.

Hill captures the fear of the refugee, the fear of the undocumented resident in a foreign country, with precision. Through Keita, we understand why some people are so desperate to leave their homelands that they will risk everything, live in the shadows in a country not their own, where they may never gain the right to be called ‘legal.’