speaking with you. you have "white house diary" now which is it the best sellers list. has done incredibly well. you planning on writing another book? you working on one no. >> guest: welcoming my next book will be in 2011 and is a collection of my bible lessons proceeds of the school every sunday. all of them are recorded. the big religious book. i have signed a contract. they have an editor to take 365 of my record and sunday school lessons and reduce them down to one page each. that will be my next book. it will be out in the fall of 2011. >> host: look forward to it and very christmas. v0v0r 2 ..

>> for just over an hour. >> good evening, everyone. i'm bill starr, executive directer of the georgia center for the book, ask we are the host -- and we are the host for this evening's program. we welcome all of you. rosa parks is one of the truly iconic figures of the civil rights movement. we know her as the older, quiet woman whose tired feet led her to defy segregation on montgomery, alabama's buses back in 1955.

her courageous, spontaneous refusal to give up up her seat to a white man sparked the boycott which gave birth to an entire movement. that's what we've been told up til now. do we really know rosa parks? the answer according to our guest this evening is very definitely no. we welcome to the center for the book tonight dr. danielle l. mcguire, assistant professor of history at wayne state university in detroit. her new book is "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" published by alfred. as her subtitle suggests, the book does not merely shed new light on rosa parks, it offers us nothing less than a new way of approaching and understanding both the woman's history and the underpinnings of the civil rights movement. it is scholarly, yet riveting

narrative that traces the sordid history of sexual violence directed against black women in the jim crow era, and it illuminates how the little-known actions of rosa parks long before ha busboy cot helped create the imwe constitution. dr. mcguire's book -- and this is a quote -- details the all-too-ignored rape of black women. just as important, she plots resistance against this outrage, the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s. please join me in welcoming dr. danielle l. mcguire. [applause] >> thank you so much. thank you, especially, to the georgia center for the book for

inviting me here and for the decatur public library for hosting us tonight and, of course, to all of you for bearing with me through this presentation. i'm thrilled that you're here tonight. in 1944 in alabama a black woman walked home from a church revival. a carload of white men kidnapped her off the street, drove her to the woods and brutally gang raped her. when they finished, they dropped her off in the middle of town, and they threatened to kill her if she told anyone what happened. but that night she told her father, her husband and the local sheriff the detill tails of the -- details of the brutal assault. a few days later the naacp called to say they were sending their very best investigator. her name was rosa park. it was 11 years before the montgomery bus boycott, and this

group of home grown activists would vaunt its president, dr. martin luther king jr., to international prominence and launching a movement that would ultimately change the world. now, rosa park carried the story back to montgomery where she and the city's most militant activists organized national and international protests for equal justice for mrs. rees si taylor. the chicago defender called it the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade. but when this coalition first took root, it would later become the montgomery improvement association. dr. king was still in high school. the 1955 montgomery bus boycott was in many ways a last act of a decadelong struggle to protect african-american women like taylor from sexualized violence and rape. in fact, the kidnapping and rape

of taylor was not unusual in the segregated south. from slavery through the better part of the 20th century, white men abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity and often -- [inaudible] they lured black women and girls away from work with promises of steady pay and better wages. they attacked them on the job. they abducted them at gunpoint while traveling to or from home, work or church. and they sexually humiliated, harassed and assaulted them on buses, in theaters and other places of public space. this is a pattern throughout the south during the 1940s and the 1950s, and it underscored the limits of southern justice. but black women did not keep their stories secret. they reclaimed their humanity by testifying about these brutal assaults, and their testimonies often led to larger campaigns for civil rights and human

dignity. in fact, even the most oft-told campaigns for civil rights, month bomb ri, birmingham, selma, the 1964 freedom summer in mississippi, they often have an unexamined history of gendered political appeals to protect black women from sexual violence. now, most of you here tonight probably know something about the montgomery bus boycott. according to popular history, who and what caused the boycott? anyone. >> rosa parks. >> rosa parks. and what was it about rosa parks? >> [inaudible] >> pardon me? >> [inaudible] >> what caused her to defy the rules on the bus? >> she was tired. >> she was of tired. he had tired feet, that's right. he had tired feet. well, when asked the same question, the former editor of the month come ri advertiser talked about somebody else. he talked about gertrude

perkins. this is what he had to say. >> gertrude perkins is not even mentioned in the history books. but she had as much to do with the bus boycott and its creation as anyone on earth. >> now, gertrude perkins loomed large enough to remember 40 years after the fact when he gave this interview. yet most histories fail to even mention her name. and if you're anything like me, when hearing this you're like, who the heck is gertrude perkins? gertrude perkins was an african-american woman, 25 years old, who is abducted and assaults by two white montgomery police officers on march 27, 1949. reverend salman faye sr. explains what happened that night. >> two policemen had picked her up and taken her down on the railroad. and had all types of sex

relations with her at that particular time. and when they put her out, she came to my door, and she told me what had happened to her. i sat down and wrote what she said had happened to her word by word. when she had finished, i had it notarized and send it to drew -- in washington, and he went to the air with it. when they knew anything here in montgomery, what the record said happened to her was all over the nation. >> after gertrude perkins told the reverend what happened, she somehow mustered the courage to report the crime to the police, perhaps even the same men who had raped her. not surprisingly, the police dismissed her claim and accused her of lying.

the mayor claimed perkins' charge was, quote, completely false, and he said holding a lineup or issuing any warrants would set a bad precedent. besides, he said, my policemen would not do a thing like that. but blacks in montgomery knew better. montgomery's police force had a reputation for racist and sexist brutality. in fact, just a few years earlier police had abducted and raped the 16-year-old daughter of a black woman who challenged a police officer on a bus one day. as word of the attack on gertrude perkins spread, naacp be activists and ministers rallied to her defense. they formed an organization called the citizens' committee for gertrude perkins, and they demanded an investigation and a trial. their public protests garnered enough anticipation to keep the -- attention to keep the story on the front pages of the white daily newspaper, the montgomery advertiser, for nearly two months. the sustained attention finally forced a grand jury hearing

where gertrude perkins testified on her own behalf. the county solicitor swore at her and accused her of lying, but she stood her ground, and she maintained her composure. her brave testimony did not impact the all-white, all-male jury, however, who failed to indict any of the officers. in an editorial designed to put any hard feelings to rest, the montgomery advertiser said the case ran the full process of our anglo-saxon system of justice. what more could have been done? well, members of the citizens' committee for gertrude perkins would have preferred an indictment and a lengthy jail sentence, but they were thrilled with the amount of public protest that their campaign had yielded. but montgomery seemed to have more of it fair share of what roy wilkins called sex cases. in fact, the taylor and perkins cases did not occur in isolation. in february 1951 a white grocery

store owner named sam green raped a black teenager named floss si hardman. green had employed her as a babysitter and frequently drove her home after her shifts. well, one night he pulled to the side of a quiet road and raped her. that night she went home, she told her parents what happened, and they decided to press charges. when an all-white jury return t a not guilty verdict, the family reached out to a celebrated football coach at alabama state university. lewis, along with e die nixon who was head of the alabama brotherhood of sleeping carporters, they organized a campaign to boycott green's store. they brought together women's groups like the women's political council and labor unions, perhaps even the same

people who had organized to defend taylor. after only a few weeks, african-americans delivered their own verdict in the case by driving green into a the red. in fact, they shut down green's grocery tore, and that ability to shut down his store constituted a major victory. not only did it establish the boycott as a powerful weapon for justice, but it also sent a message to whites that african-americans would no longer allow white men to disrespect, abuse and violate black women's bodies. now, besides police officers, few were as guilty of these crimes as were the city's bus operators who bullied and brutalized black passengers daily. worse, bus drivers had police powers. they carried blackjacks and often guns, and they assaulted and sometimes even killed african-americans who violated the racial order of jim crow. in 1953 alone african-americans filed over 30 complaints of

abuse and mistreatment on the buses. most of these complaints came from black women, mostly working class women who were domestic who made up the bulk of the montgomery city line's ridership. drivers hurled nasty, sexualized insults at black women, they touched them inappropriately and often physically abused them. one woman remembered a bus driver sexually harassing her. >> the bus was up high, she said, and the street was down low. they'd drive up and expose themselves while i was just standing there. it scared me to death. another remembered that bus drivers treated black women just as rough as can be, she said. like we're some kind of animals. it denied black women a sense of dignity and demonstrated they were not worthy or respect or protection. this belief was part of a longstanding pattern that allowed white men to use and

abuse black women for the better part of of even the 20th centur. but when we consider this within a spectrum of racial and sexual violence with rape and lynching on one end and these daily indignities on the other, attacks on black women's bodily integrity underscored both their physical and their sexual vulnerability in a racial caste system. so it was much easier -- not to mention safer -- for black women to just stop riding the buses than it was to bring their assailants -- often bus drivers and police officers -- to justice. in fact, without these women the bus boycott would have failed. african-american women ran the day-to-day operation of the boycott, the everyday details, the spade work. they helped staff the elaborate car pool system that kept the boycott running. they raised most of the local money for the movement, they filled the majority of pews at the mass meetings where they testified publicly about

physical and sexual abuse on the buses. by walking hundreds of miles to protest humiliation, african-american women reclaimed their bodies and demanded to be treated with dignity and respect. and so while the montgomery bus boycott is often portrayed as a spontaneous and often male-led movement, it's important to note that it has a path. it's rooted in the struggle to protect and defend black womanhood, and be i think it's impossible for us to understand and situate the boycott in its proper historical context without understanding the stories of taylor and perkins and the others who were mistreated in montgomery. in fact, without this history it's impossible for us to understand why so many black women walked for so long to protest mistreatment on the buses. now, montgomery was not the only

place where attacks on black women fueled protests against white supremacy. civil rights campaigns in little rock, arkansas, where the hair wynn of the desegregation campaign had used her newspaper for a decade to publicly shame white men who assaulted black women. albany, georgia, this 1962 where local people organized to defend black women at albany state college from white men who prowled around campus at night. birmingham and selma, alabama, in the early 1960s whose police and bus drivers were notorious for their racist and sexist practices. or mississippi during the 1964 freedom summer where black women activists who were alet'sed were often -- arrested were often beaten and sexually abused while they were in prison. all of these major campaigns had roots in organized resistance to

defend black womanhood. all of this despite a growing body of literature that focuses on the roles of black and white women and the operation of gender in the movement and now plays little or no role in the histories of the african-american freedom struggle even as we focus on racist violence against examples of racist brutality, but we ignore what happened to black women. in order to truly understand the civil rights movement, we need to understand these stories, we need to understand this history. the sexual exploitation of black women, of course, had it roots in slavery. slave owners strengthened their political, their social and their economic power really for two reasons. one, colonial laws made the offspring of slave women the property of their master giving

slave owners a financial incentive to abuse their slaves. and be, two, colonial laws that banned interracial marriage but not fornication or childbirth out of wedlock awarded white men exclusive sexual access to black and white women while denying black women the respectability and rights granted by a legal relationship. these laws created a system that allowed white men to police white women's sexual and marital choices and sexually abuse black women with impunity, both of which maintained white men's position atop a political and economic power structure. after slavery fell, these practices often remained. for example, during reconstruction former slave holders and their sympathizers used violence to reassert control over freed people. in fact, race became a weapon of terror, and interracial rape became the battleground upon which black men and be women

fought for ownership and control of their very own bodies. so interracial rape was deployed as a justification for lynching black men even though they were often accused of attacking white women. whites created the myth of the black beast rapist, the incue bus. portraying them as a piece that attacked white -- beast that attacked white women while they slept. and they used this image whenever they feared losing power. for example, like democrats in north carolina used the image of the incue bus in 1900 to regain political control after the biracial fusion party took every single statewide office in 1898. women like ida b. wells argued that white men accused black men of rape as, quote, part of a

larger system of intimidation. worse, she argued, they did this to mask their own barberrism and attacks on black women. she knew that white men attacked black women in an almost ritualistic fashion throughout the jim crow era. now, black women were victimized, to be sure, but "at the dark end of the street" is not just about victimization. many black women fought back be by speaking out. from the slave narratives to gertrude perkins, african-american women denounced their sexual misuse deploying their voices as weapons in the war against white supremacy. but for every woman that spoke out, there were undoubtedly many more who kept these brutal attacks to themselves. and silence could be a useful strategy especially when whites used racist violence and sexual abuse to shore up white

supremacy. for example, african-american leaders embraced the causes of respectability and adhered to a culture of silence as a matter of political necessity during the brutal white backlash unleashed by the 1954 supreme court decision outlawing segregation in public schools. for many supporters of segregation, integration always meant miscegenation, or as mississippi judge and founder of the white citizens' council, tom brady, put it, amalgamation. headlines in the citizens' capital newspapers warned whites that the incubus was coming. mixed marriage, sex orgies and accounts of black men raping white women were, quote, stories filtering back from areas where integration is proceeding. in fact, here the citizens' council leader espousing these theories. >> don't you ever give up that

gun. that's all you've got heft to protect that little -- left to protect that little baby in that crib. because these dirty devils will be in your home. that's what they want, they do not want equality. you know they don't want equality. they don't want something like you've got, they want what you've got, your women! finish. >> because segregationists employed these sexual scare tactics, particularly the black beast rapist to oppose brown and cultivate white fear, any impropriety on the part of african-americans could be viewed as threatening the social order. this is why african-americans in montgomery chose rosa parks as a symbol of the movement instead of the many other black women who could have easily filled that role. and so while silence was used at times for political reasons, its

near-universal adoption among scholars, despite evidence to the contrary, created a void in the historical record. by assuming silence, historians have missed important milestones in the civil rights movement that i hope my work captures. for example, the arrest, trial and conviction of four white men for raping betty jean o owens, a black college student, in tallahassee, florida, in 1959 was a watershed event. the willingness of betty jean owens to testify against her assailants focused national attention on the sexual exploitation of black women at the hand of white men. when an all-white jury handed down a life sentence, it not only o broke with southern tradition, it fractured the philosophical and political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the legal relationship based on those colonial era laws that i

mentioned earlier between sexual domination and racial inequality. for perhaps the first time since reconstruction, southern blacks could imagine state power being deployed in defense of their own personhood. betty jean owens' grandmother recognized the importance of this historic decision. she said, i've hived to see the -- lived to see the day where white men really could be brought to trial for what they did. the tallahassee case led to convictions elsewhere that summer, in montgomery, alabama, inial here, north carolina, and in south carolina where a white marine actually received the death penalty for raping a black woman. that's the first one that i found, and it was overturned on appeal. but in each case white supremacy faltered in the fate of the courageous black women who testified on their own behalf. john mcclay, the editor of a

newspaper, wondered if these convictions pointed to a new day. this forced intimacy, he said, goes back to the days of slavery when our women were the cattle property of white men. are we now witnessing the arrival of all women, he says? are they at long last gaining the emancipation they've needed? mcclay recognized that freedom was meaningless without ownership and control of your own body. desegregation and equality meant little if you could not walk down the streets unmolested. as al baker put it a year later, the freedom struggle was bigger than a hamburger. as a result, the 1959 tallahassee case was a major civil rights milestone. a 1965 case in hattieses burg, mississippi, was another milestone historians have missed. here's a clip of holland who

testifies about black women and girls' special vulnerability in the segregated south. >> i went to babysit for this white family, and the white woman called me upstairs. i went up the stairs in a hurry so as not to keep the white woman waiting. she said, mr. laws wants to see you, and i looked in the bed, he was laying there among the bed clothes, and i said, yes, sir, mr. laws, what you want with me? and he immediately pulled me down into the bed and be had intercourse with me. i was 11 years old. it was my birthday. there was no reason for us to run tell our mother or our father because they couldn't do anything about it we'd get killed if we said something about it, so many times we girls would talk in the bathroom about it, you know, never telling our parents. but it happened very, very frequently. ♪

>> the tenuousness of black life in mississippi left more than physical scars, it also left deep psychological wound. >> i hated it. i had all kind of fantasies about it. i was fascinated by people like david and goliath stories. i'd use my favorite biblical characters to kick folks' butt, you know? many i liked mosess drowning everybody in the red sea. >> can i used to go in the wood, i used to go in the backwoods and preach, scream, fight 'em, run into bushes, kick trees, pretend they was white folk be. >> so you learn how to negotiate your life with white folk.

and i guess you also learn the fear associated with them, of how much power they actually held, how they could determine whether you continued toly or whether you -- live or whether you die. ..

>> and thelma, alabama, the staunchest supporters of segregation use of the fear of interracial and the rhetoric of race to resuscitate and to revive jim crow. they use the kind of sexual mccarthyism to discredit the voting rights act, to defend the risk their lives. civil rights activists were no longer outside agitators. or communists are now they were sexual themes. intent on spreading a culture of depravity around the country. so it was within that storm, and because i think that the ku klux klan murdered viola, a white housewife who defied general and racial mores by embracing the black freedom struggle. her detractors of course a juicer of black men.

if we incorporate analysis of race and sexual violence interwoven civil rights narratives, we change the historical marker of the movement. one voting rights act is often referenced as of the book the civil rights movement, one of the last legal barriers of black women's integrity fell in 1967 when the supreme court banned laws prohibiting interracial marriage in a landmark loving v. virginia decision. this law was rooted in the colonial era that i mentioned earlier and the ban on interracial marriage was one of the last messages of slavery to fall. but only by placing the loving decision within the long struggle of bodily integrity and freedom from racial and sexual care can't be properly recognized as a major marker in civil rights movement. now the right of black women to defend themselves of sexual

violence was tested in 1975 trial of julian little. joe when little was a petite 20 job african-american inmate in washington, north carolina. one night in august of 1974, clarence, a 60 gear will cheer up, entered her cell. he allegedly threatened her with an ice pick and sexy assaulted her. during the attack, little somehow managed to grab the ice pick from him and proceeded to stab him to death. as little prepared for trial for murder, a broad coalitions of support from the national organization of women, to the black panther party, rallied to her defense. the free and little movement neared eclectic organizations that formed to protect recy taylor in 1944. like the committee for equal justice for mrs. recy taylor,

the freak show and little movement was led primarily african-american women. and i will say this. in detroit, the free joan little movement was led by rosa parks. at her trial, defense attorneys tried to paint her as a typical black jezebel, enslaved. they attacked a credibility they portrayed her as a prostitute. they suggested little wanted to have with the jailer, that she seduced him and then killed him in an elaborate plot to escape. littles attorney on the the oven at her store into a much longer context. he read to the jury and long passage from african-american woman's 190 to essay decrying the lack of protection for black womanhood and a special vulnerability of system for white men could use them regularly. by reading this passage a loud and pointing to decades of abuse in the past, he bore witness to

black women's long-standing tradition of testimony and their attempt for dignity. after deliberating for over an hour, the jury unanimously voted to acquit joan little of murder. as the jury foreman read the verdict, little broke into sobs at the defense table, and her lawyers clustered around her. wiping away tears and perhaps channeling down come in naked region and what if black women had finally achieved emancipation, she said, it feels good to be free. now, this cartoon in the baltimore afro-american hailed the verdict as a major victory. here though is portrayed as a champion boxer standing atop a bruised and battered jim crow. hoisting littles gloved fist into the air her attorneys proclaim victory for their champ, and a triumph over jim crow racism. with a star slung around his

head, looking tired and kind of overweight, confederate flag shorts, old jim crow is finally down for the count. if we are to fully understand the role of gender and sexuality in the civil rights movement, and if were going to provide what nell painter calls a truly loaded cost accounting of white supremacy, then we've got to include analyses of sexual violence, testimony, and protest that really remained at the volatile core of the modern civil rights. thank you for coming tonight. [applause] >> i guess now we have ambient

sound. right here. i thought it was time for indian sound. >> what was that they catch onto this research in the beginning? talus of the story about it. >> that's a great question. it was 1998 and i was a masters student at the university of wisconsin, and is helping my professor clean his office. i guess that's what i get paid to it as his assistant. and we were listening to npr, and we heard them talk about gertrude parkins on npr. and i just stopped in my tracks and i said then what i said to deny, who is go to perkins? and so shocking to me that he thought she had something to do with the montgomery bus boycott, this woman and 1949, but i felt compelled to go to the archives and dig of old newspapers, and read about tucker perkins.

and so i found the story, and i didn't know what to do with it. it was the first word that i found about this issue of sexual violence and the south. there was no way to connect to the montgomery bus boycott at this time. there was no contact. so i put it aside, and did know what to do with it. a couple months later i was working on a tallahassee case. my professor had stumbled across it in researching a book about robert williams, a naacp leader in north carolina. he said this is an interesting story, why don't you look at this? i said okay. and i start to look into that case, and get to know the store. i did that for a masters thesis, and again i put it aside. i finished my masters and went to work for two years and did know what to do with it. when i came back to graduate school a couple years later i said, there's got to be more to this. they can't just be an outlier. i've read about this stuff happening in slavery, and i

don't know if it ended during the period after slavery. so let me look into it i started reading black newspapers. in the front pages of the blacks -- of the black newspapers had the store is plastered all over them. i was shocked that i been reading all of these history books and none of them talk about what was on the front pages of black newspapers. so, i just started doing more and more research. and slowly but surely, the little puzzle pieces start to come together and come to a bigger story, a different story about the civil rights movement. it took a long time. >> in terms of your research, did you have opportunities for interviews, or what other sources of data did you have besides newspapers? >> thank you. yeah, i did interview a number of people. in fact, i was very lucky to

interview recy taylor, who, the woman was raped in 1944 by the carload of white men. she will be 91 issue, still alive, and she is waiting for justice. still waiting for justice. felt very blessed to be able to talk to her. and i interviewed a number of other women in birmingham, and handful of people in montgomery. i use a lot of images that i found in the archives, whether historians may have asked a question instantly talk about what happened to them but they never really followed up. i looked at court documents and tried to get court proceedings, trial transcripts, stuff like that. i got a lot of material in a tallahassee case in that regard. a lot of the trials and cases that are right about in mississippi, the transcripts went missing or were thrown away or destroyed after many years. i talked to old attorneys on some of these cases. i have not spoken to any of the essays, although a couple of them are still imprisonein prison for the crimes. that they committed after they

were acquitted. but i was sort of afraid to talk to them. so there was a lot of digging through the archives, through court records, old newspapers. and talking to a lot of people on the ground. >> didn't the white wives get upset enough with their husbands that that would stop the raids, or not? >> not that i found. though it wasn't the focus of my inquiries. i do think that white women's silence made him somewhat complicit. in these cases come and you see that during slavery in particular. but there were a handful of white women who organized particularly jessie daniels and the association of white women, southern white women for the prevention of legend in the 1930 called out the use of the myth of the black rape to protect white womanhood. and they said we are tired of using this tactic in our names. you cannot use it any longer but

it's not about as. it's about you. so there were women who spoke out. a pioneer for justice in the south, during this time could as well. but most white woman i think kept her mouth shut. >> thank you. thank you for your work. it's intriguing. it's so rich. i'm curious, my mother was born of an assault, by a rate. and her family, she was in aberdeen, mississippi, was where she was born. and the family fled to cleveland as part of the great migration. i don't like to know whether there was any exploration of children who were born as a result of this sexual violence, and how the women and their families dealt with them?

>> thank you. i'm really sorry to destroy, although i will say that store is very common, and a lot of women that i spoke to would tell that story. particularly about the grandmothers. the cases that i studied, as far as i know, did not result in any children of the attacks did not result in any children. but a lot of the black women who were attacked left town. forced out and often came back home. recy taylor did not leave. she stayed with her family was under death threats regularly. her father come in fact, she moved in with her father and he stayed up at night the backyard perched in the branches of an old tree, with a shotgun ready to ward off any night fighters to a lot of women left the south as part of the great migration, because this is one of those

push factors, pushing people out of the south, sexual violence. and a lot of people state. i think for as many women who testified about these crimes, there were many more insight into buried the story and kept on with their daily lives. unit, never expecting justice, and just hoping to continue, you know, along with their daily activity. that's what recy taylor did in many ways. left town for a while and they went back to tallahassee. some of the other women that i've written about, sometimes the the story ends in archives. we don't hear back. you don't know what happened for sure. it's kind of up in the air. but the story is not surprising. very common. >> i would like to hear more about rosa parks and maybe you think she was one of the best investigators. they're going to center for the recy taylor incident, and also i

mean, what was her, the rest of her life like and her investigation story? and also, what did she say about her feet being tied? is that something she bought are not? >> she protested that state a. the only target was, she said, was tired of being mistreated. that's been written about before. rosa parks, her activist history is well known i think, for scholars of the civil rights movement. although the popular presentation of her is of this mainly seamstress as if she did anything else except so people's clothing all day. with tired feet. so rosa parks work as the secretary of the montgomery naacp from 1943 through the montgomery bus boycott. in that role should it just take notes, during meetings as the title implies, but she was a detective. what that meant was she traveled a dusty back roads of alabama, often at great risk, in order to

document the crimes that were committed against african-americans. she would take the stores dr. montgomery where she and e.d. nixon and other people in power would decide whether not to launch a campaign or to bring legal charges. they use the kind of cruel triage in a way to figure out which cases could be used as a public protest, in which cases they couldn't get they had to figure out which cases were political possible to bring forward and launch a public campaign against. so she did that. she was the grandchild, so she was raised to believe in black power and black nationalism. her grandfather believe in arms -- or to self-defense, so did she. she spoke at the feel of robert williams, shockingly. we forget about that rosa parks. that rosa parks who would give a eulogy for a man who stood up for arms self-defense, and was decried during the 1960s, for

his militancy. she married a man who carried a pistol around town, and he was one of those earliest organizers of the montgomery naacp and was a defender of the scottsboro, who were put on trial and jailed for many years, accused of raping white women on alabama freight train. so she did a lot of things. and often her story ends up at the montgomery bus boycott but she marched in almost every major campaign of the civil rights movement and continued her activism in detroit where, as i noted in 1975, she basically headed the detroit branch of the free joan little committed to she is in 1975 continue to give anti-rave activism, at a time now and everyone thinks popular because the women's movements had made speak out feasible. black woman like rosa parks had been doing it for a long, long time. she is much more interesting than textbooks portray her as come and much more militant.

she's a radical in her own right, and i think we do her and ourselves a disservice by rendering the tired rosa parks and not the militant rosa parks. >> i thank you for writing this book to i graduated in 1966. of course, in the case of ms. liuzzo. what did they fight with her yet she was killed and they didn't bother the rest of them? >> unser, i did hear your question. >> in the case of strength three, she was killed. but whether two or three other young with her at that time? >> no. she was in the car with a young man he was about 19. he pretended he was dead in order to save himself, the other clan members who murdered viola from her car window, they're in high speed chase on the highway and they shot after out of their car window, murdered her. her carted off the side of the road.

they got out of their car and went to go to make sure both passengers were dead. so he lay as still as a stone in order to make him believe he was a dead. soon as the car pulled away he jumped up and try to flag down the next guy which happened to be a carload of snake workers and voting rights activists heading back to selma, told them what happened. there were other martyrs in the summer campaign of course. but that night it was just her and leroy. >> thank you very much for this refreshing perspective on the civil rights movement. one of the things that to me here tonight is the title of your book, and as a historian myself i know that some of the hottest things to do in terms of writing history is to decide on a title. because you want your title

catching. you want your title to be attractive. and i like the fact that you point to a new history of the civil rights movement. but i also wondered about the decision of using rosa parks instead of recy taylor, if you thought about that, and if it crossed your mind, and if it crossed your mind from recy taylor to the rise of black power, or the past, still suffer of drawing us to the familiar. and want you have that, then you come up with speech i'll be very honest about the panther come and the top part of the telecom "at the dark end of the street" is mine and mine alone. i picked that. my editor chose the subtitle. we worked on it together, but i wanted it to be black women, rape and resistant and she said no, no, no.

it have to be more than that. so we ended up with this long title that takes two minutes to say out loud and takes up the entire cover of the book. but i ended up liking it because i thought it explain exactly what the book was about and did exactly what you said, challenge -- rosa parks and new history, what could that be? i will say that recy taylor is on the cover. that's her. [inaudible] >> they will come with a microphone. >> what about joan little? what happened with the rest of her life? >> joan little is a very interesting case because she was an inmate, she was a criminal. and she had a pretty shady history. mostly the intercommunity didn't like her. her parents had a hard time with

her. and she wasn't the kind of person that people wanted to rally around, you know. she was no rosa parks. and so the attorneys i in the ce had to work really hard to present her as a respectable woman, he was acting in self-defense as opposed to doing any kind of premeditated escape plan. and for a while she did some speaking engagements at the black party panther -- at the black panther party and then she drifted off and very few people are from her again. she didn't show up at speaking engagements after a bit. and was late for appointments. and then there's an article i think in the '80s of her being arrested, caught with a shot off shotgun in a car in brooklyn, new york. that's it, the archival trail ends. and i don't know what happened to her since then. but i struggled with hard with the joan little case because

almost all the other women that are worked on, and whose testimony i read, whose evidence i've gathered, i believed. in my core. and i wondered for a long time whether or not joan little was telling the truth. and whether or not she was a case i could really get behind. but ultimately i think listening to her testimony and listening to her attorneys talk about her, and reading the transcript, i believe her and i believe her because i don't think that she could have gone up there and pretended her way out of that murder case. you know, she was smart and she was like. she had a little bit of a criminal mind, she wasn't making this up. unit, the trial transcript made that clear in that case i'm particularly grateful that those trial transcript are available. the judges notes are there at chapel hill, and the library at chapel hill, north carolina.

so she wasn't interesting case. [inaudible] >> i don't know the name of the top of my head. it's probably in my footnote. it's from the history, black women's testimonies and speeches and thoughts. i can't remember the title of it. dini, do you know? [inaudible] >> something like that. it's in my footnote. yeah, it's an older book but it's full of really good information. really good primary source. >> can you quantify your measure in some way, what extent this impression of black women and violence against them by people, how much that influenced the civil rights movement, would it have happened sooner or more

widespread? can you give us some insight into that? >> that's another great question. i think that these cases and public protest and these cases was very prominent in the 1940s and early 1950s. and they kind of comic income when something like this happens a lot of black organizations rallied to promote these cases as examples of southern brutality. and as examples of un-american behavior, particularly at a time when he does states was at in europe. these cases were really useful political tool in the 1940s and americans recognize the rhetoric of american democracy and reality. but by the 1950s when the politics shifted and it was this brutal backlash to the brown decision it made it much harder to talk about sexual violence in

public. and made more difficult for african-americans and liberal and leftist organizations to promote these cases as sort of propaganda cases to highlight the southern injustice. so what i found is that these cases sorted and in float in terms of public -- sort of and in float in terms of public propaganda. but that the underground they serve to motivate people to not only joint and doubly cp but often small southern towns to form a naacp. so what the stories told me was more about what local people come what ordinary everyday people were concerned about on a day-to-day basis. it was good to get voting rights, very important, crucial to have your citizenship recognized. but what would it mean if you could vote but you could walk home from church without being

abducted and assaulted and your essay that would walk free? so some of this is about what ordinary local people needed to accomplish daily, and on a daily basis. so i think that the campaign, it did so in the form of a catalyst working to bring people together to form local naacp chapters. >> this may be a bit of an unfair question to ask, but as you went through this work thinking about the world that we live in today, do you find any resonance of what you studied in which you wrote about for the world we're living in right now? >> sure. i think in order to understand the way that black woman are portrayed in popular media, we need to understand this history. belt off and black women are objectified and subjugated. their bodies are sexualized, overly sexualized. not just by white men but by everyone.

and so that sexualization is rooted in the past. that's the jezebel right there. and i think that if we look at the wake michelle obama is treated today, there's a focus on her body in a way that i don't have anyone talk about other first ladies bodies. maybe because they weren't as down as michelle obama's. [laughter] but really, i don't know anybody sort of talking about are objectified the bodies of other first ladies the way that they have michelle obama. and i also think that, you know, there's been a lot of complaints about her not in these words, but really acting uppity. stepping out of her place to have you other at other first ladies be criticized meeting with dignitaries? usually we're proud of our first leg when they go to europe and the meet with royalty. but somehow michelle obama caught a lot of heat this summer for doing that. budget because she went on on vacation there in spain, but i think that what people were saying was that she was playing the lady.

and that that was not appropriate for black women. it echoed a lot of the complaint that i've seen in a reconstruction era, newspapers and historical studies in which black women took office late uniform and put on a fancy dress, were accused and i quote of applying the lady. so i think there's a lot of resonance in had these stereotypes of black women, the objectification of their bodies continues to this day. [inaudible] >> absolutely. it's all over hip-hop unfortunately. i think that, that's why i say it's not just, black women seem to be deep -- seemed to be equal opportunity, they are equally objectified by lots of different people at this point. so you see it, i think i'm due most explicitly right now in rap video. >> i think that the gentlemen

sort of ask the question i was about to ask, but based on your inside, i wonder what you think of what you thought of the cross case. if you look into that at all or if you had a different perspective? >> i was in the thick of this research when that happened, and the first time i read it i said oh, boy, i've heard this story before. a lot. and i'll be honest, immediate -- that it was part of a long-standing practice, especially among fraternity men. and the athletes were not immune to objectified women, and so the story smacked of that kind of case studies i have been working on. so i jumped to conclusions right away. bubut in the more that a bit abt the more i thought of something not right with his story. i'm just not sure what it is. and so i refrained really from talking