Ten years later thousands of working- and middle-class women, fed up with decades of abuse, took tot he streets to protest their mistreatment and demand the right to ‘sit with dignity’. The Montgomery bus boycott, frequently regarded as the spark plug of the modern civil rights movement, was actually the end of a drive chain that ran back into decades of black women’s activism. That supposedly “spontaneous” event [of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat] was, in fact, the culmination of a deep history of gendered political appeals - frequently led by black veterans - for the protection of African American women from sexual and physical assault. Only by understanding the relatively hidden history of sexualized violence in Montgomery, Alabama, and African Americans’ efforts to protect black womanhood, can we see that the Motgomery bus boycott was more than a movement for civil rights. It was also a women’s movement for dignity, respect, and bodily integrity. —

- At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire

y’all i’m reading a really gr8 book. you should probably check this shit out. it tells the stories of the black womyn activists that are generally reduced to footnotes in mainstream historical accounts of the modern civil rights movement. i was a little offput to find out that the author is a white womyn (our stories are getting told the same way they always do, i suppose), but it’s still super interesting and informative. i would love to know if something like this has been written by black womyn writers!
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Posted on October 3rd, 2011 at 5:15PM
142 notes
#Sexismo#books#dopeshit#feminisms#racial#Herstory
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