Rosa Parks was often described as a lovely and reticent elderly girl whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s town buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave delivery towards the civil rights motion.

The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay down under the 1955 boycott is far not the same as anything previously written.

With this groundbreaking and important publication, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of the about At the Dark End of the Street: Dark Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Dark Power twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying in the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white males, armed with kitchen knives and shotguns, purchased the young female to their green Chevrolet, raped her, and remaining her for dead. The leader of the neighborhood NAACP branch office sent his greatest investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks. In taking on this case, Parks released a movement that ultimately transformed the world.

The writer gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began; how it had been simply were only available in protest against the ritualistic rape of dark ladies by white guys who used financial intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the independence movement; and exactly how those pushes persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow period when white males assaulted dark females to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that started during World War II and experienced to the Black Power motion. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not the birth, of that struggle.

On the Dark End of the road describes the decades of degradation black ladies around the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to prepare and clean because of their white bosses. It reveals how Rosa Parks, by 1955 one of the most radical activists in Alabama, got got enough. “There had to be a stopping place,” she stated, “and this appeared to be the place for me personally to stop being pushed around.” Parks refused to move from her chair over the bus, was arrested, and, with fierce activist Jo Ann Robinson, structured a one-day bus boycott.

The protest, designed to last twenty-four hours, became a yearlong struggle for dignity and justice. It broke the back of the Montgomery city bus lines and bankrupted the business.

We see how and just why Rosa Parks, rather than becoming a innovator of the motion she helped to start out, was converted into symbolic of virtuous dark womanhood, sainted and celebrated for her peaceful dignity, prim demeanor, and middle-class propriety-her radicalism basically erased. And we see aswell how thousands of black ladies whose courage and fortitude helped to change America were decreased to the footnotes of background.

A controversial, moving, and courageous reserve; narrative history at its greatest.