Transcripts For CSPAN3 Book Discussion On At The Dark End Of The Street 20151213

That is what we have been told up till now. But 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 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 through the rise of black power. As her subtitle suggests, the book does not not merely shed new light on rosa parks and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, it offers us nothing less than a new way of approaching an understanding both the womens history and the underpinnings of the Civil Rights Movement. It is a scholarly yet riveting narrative that traces a sordid history of Sexual Violence directed against black women in the jim crow era and illuminates how the littleknown actions of rosa parks long before that bus boycott helped create the impetus for Civil Rights Movements. Historian Nell Irvin Painter says that dr. Maguires book details the all too ignored tactic of rape of black women in the everyday practice of southern White Supremacy. Just as important, she plots resistance against this outrage as an integral fact of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Her book is as essential as its history is infuriating. Please join me in welcoming dr. Danielle maguire. [applause] danielle thank you so much. Thank you especially to the Georgia Center for the book for inviting me and the Decatur Public Library for hosting us, and to all of you for bearing with me through this presentation. I am thrilled that you are here tonight. In 1944, in abbeville, alabama, a black woman named recy taylor walked home from a church revival. A car load of white men kidnapped her off the street, drove her to the woods, and brutally gang raped her. When they finished, they dropped her in the middle of town and threatened to kill her if she told anyone what happened. But that night she told her father, her husband, and the local sheriff the details of the brutal assault. A few days later, the montgomery naacp said they were sending their very best investigator. Her name was rosa parks. It was 11 years before the montgomery bus boycott. And 11 years later, this group of homegrown activists would become better known as the montgomery improvement association, vaunting its president , dr. Martin luther king jr. , to International Prominence and launching a movement that would ultimately change the world. Rosa parks carried recy taylors story back to montgomery, where she and the most militant activists organized a national and international protest for equal justice for mrs. Recy taylor. The chicago defender called it the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade. But when this coalition took root, it would become the montgomery improvement association, dr. King was still in high school. The 1955 montgomery bus boycott, often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights drama, was in many ways the last act of a decadeslong struggle to protect africanamerican women like recy taylor from sexualized violence and rape. The kidnapping and rape of recy 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 impunity. 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 or work or church. They sexually humiliated, harassed, and assaulted them on buses, in theaters and other places of public space. This was a pattern throughout the south during the 1940s and 1950s and it underscore the limits of southern justice. But black women did not keep their stories secret. They reclaim 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 and illustrious campaigns for civil rights, montgomery, 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. What was it about rosa parks . What caused her to defy the rules on the bus . She was tired. Thats right. She had tired feet. When asked the same question, joe azbell, the former editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, talked about somebody else, 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. Danielle now, Gertrude Perkins loomed large enough in azbells mind to remember her 40 years after the fact when he gave this interview. Yet most histories of the bus boycott fail to even mention her name. And if you are anything like me, when hearing this, you are like who the heck is Gertrude Perkins . Well, Gertrude Perkins was an africanamerican woman, 25 years old, who was abducted and assaulted by two White Montgomery Police Officers on march 27, 1949. Ill let reverend solomon seay senior explain what happened that night. Two policemen picked her up on the railroad. They had all types of sex relations with her at that particular time. When they put her out, she came to my door. 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 sent it to drew pearson in washington. And drew pearson went to the air with it. What Gertrude Perkins said happened to her was all over the nation. After Gertrude Perkins told reverend seay 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 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. Montgomerys police force had a reputation for racist and sexist brutality. In fact just a few years earlier, police had abducted and raped the 16yearold daughter of a black woman who challenged a Police Officer on a bus one day. As word of the attack on Gertrude Perkins spread, club women, naacp activists, labor leaders and ministers rallied to her defense. They formed an Umbrella Organization called the Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins and they demanded an investigation and a trial. Their public protests garnered enough 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 maintained her composure. Her brave testimony did not impact the allwhite allmale 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 anglosaxon system of justice. What more could have been done . Well, members of the Citizens Committee 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 its fair share of what roy wilkins called sex cases. In fact, the recy taylor and Gertrude Perkins cases did not occur in isolation. In february 1951, a White Grocery store owner named sam green raped a black teenager named flossie hartman. Green had employed her as a babysitter and frequently drove her home after her shifts. One night, he pulled to the side of a quiet road and raped her. That night, she went home and told her parents what happened. They decided to press charges. When an allwhite jury delivered a not guilty verdict after deliberating for only five minutes, the family reached out to rufus lewis, a world war ii veteran and celebrated football coach at Alabama State university. Lewis, along with edie nixon, who was head of the montgomery naacp, organized a campaign to boycott greens store. They brought together womens groups like the womens Political Council and labor unions, perhaps even the same people who had organized to defend recy taylor. After only a few weeks, African Americans delivered their own verdict in the case by driving green into the red. They shut down greens Grocery Store. And that ability to shut down his Grocery 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 africanamericans would no longer allow white men to disrespect, abuse, and violate black womens bodies. Besides Police Officers, few were as guilty of these crimes as were the citys 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 africanamericans who violated the racial order of jim crow. In 1953 alone, africanamericans filed over 30 complaints of abuse and mistreatment on the buses. Most of these complaints came from black women, mostly workingclass women who were domestics, who made up the bulk of the Montgomery City lines ridership. Drivers hurled nasty sexualized insults at black women, touched them inappropriately and often physically abused them. One woman remembered bus drivers sexually harassing her as she waited on the corner. The bus was up high, she said, and the street was down low. They would drive up and expose themselves while i was just standing there. It scared me to death. Another remembered they treated black women just as rough as can be, like were some kind of animal. They denied black women a sense of dignity and demonstrated they were not worthy of 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 even the 20th century. 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 womens 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. Without these women, the bus boycott would have failed. Africanamerican women ran the daytoday operation of the boycott. They helped stop the elaborate carpool 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, africanamerican 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 maleled movement, its important to know that the montgomery bus boycott has a past. It is rooted in the struggle to protect and defend black womanhood from racial and Sexual Violence. And i think its impossible for us to understand and situate the boycott in its proper Historical Context without understanding the stories of recy taylor and Gertrude Perkins, and the others who were mistreated. In fact, without this history, its 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 daisy bates, the heroine of the Little Rock School desegration campaign, had used her newspaper for a decade to publicly shame white men who assaulted black women, or albany, georgia in 1962, where local people defended black women at Albany State College from white men who frequently broke into their dorms and prowled around campus at night. Or 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 arrested were often beaten and sexually abused while they were in prison. All of these Major Campaigns have roots in organized resistance to sexualized violence and gendered political appeals 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 scenes of rape play little or no role in most histories of the African American freedom struggle, even as we focused on racist violence against black and white men like emmett till. And goodman and schwarner and cheney. All of these provide gripping 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 its roots in slavery. Slaveowners stolen access to black womens bodies strengthened their political, their social, and their economic power 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 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 womens sexual choices and marital choices, and sexually abuse black women with impunity. Both of which maintained white mens position on top of the political and economic power structure. After slavery fell, these practices often remained. For example, during reconstruction, former slaveholders and their sympathizers used violence to reassert control over freed people. Rape became a weapon of terror and interracial rape became a battleground upon which black men and women fought for ownership and control of their very own bodies. Interracial rape was deployed as a justification for lynching black men who violated any aspect of the racial status quo, even though they were often accused of attacking white women. In order to maintain power and control, whites created the myth of the black beast rapist, the incubus, portraying them as a beast that attacked white women while they slept. And they used this image whenever they feared losing power. For example, white democrats in North Carolina used the image of the incubus in 1900 to regain political control after the biracial fusion party took every single statewide office in 1898. Black club women like ida b. Wells, who led the crusade against lynching in the 1890s, argued that white men accused black men of rape as part of a larger system of intimidation. Worse, she argued, they did this to mask their own barbarism 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 who were raped or assaulted fought back by speaking out. From the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs to ida b. Wells to Gertrude Perkins, africanamerican women described and denounced their sexual misuse, deploying their voices as weapons in the wars 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, africanamerican leaders embraced the politics of respectability and adhered to a culture of silence as a matter of political necessity during the brutal white backlash unleashed from 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 Council newspaper warned whites that the incubus was coming. Mixed marriage, sex orgies, and accounts of black men raping white girls were typical of stories filtering back from areas where racial integration is proceeding with all deliberate speed. Here is a Citizens Council leader espousing these feelings. Dont you ever give up that gun. That is all youve got left to protect that little baby in the crib. Because these dirty devils will be in your homes. That is what they want. They do not want equality. You know they dont want equality. They dont want Something Like youve got. They want what youve got, your women. Danielle because segregationists employed these sexual scare tactics, particularly the myth of the black beast rapist, to cultivate white fear and resentment towards integration, any gender or racial impropriety on the part of africanamericans could be viewed as threatening the social order. This is why africanamericans in montgomery chose rosa parks as a symbol of the movement instead of the many other black women who could have easily fill that role. While silence was used at times for political reasons, its near universal adoption amongst 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 Owens, a black College Student in tallahassee, florida in 1959 was a watershed event. The willingness of Betty Jean Owens to testify against her assailant focused National Attention on the Sexual Exploitation of black women at the hands of white men. When an allwhite jury handed down a life sentence, it not only 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 have 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, in raleigh, North Carolina, and in burton, south carolina, where a white marine actually received the Death Penalty for raping a black woman, the first that i found, and it was overturned on appeal. But in each case, White Supremacy faltered in the face of the courageous black women who testified on their own behalf. John mcrae, the editor of south carolinas lighthouse and informer newspaper wondered if these conventions pointed to a new day. This forced intimacy, he said, goes back to the days of slavery, when our women were the chattel property of white man. Are we now witnessing the arrival of our women, he said . Are they at long last gaining the emancipation they have needed . Mcrae 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 street unmolested. 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 hattiesburg, mississippi was another milestone that historians have missed. Heres a clip of indicia ida may hollins, who testified about black women and girls special vulnerability in the segregated south. I went to a babysit for this white family. The white woman called me upstairs. I went on upstairs in a hurry so as not to keep the white woman waiting, she said he wants to see you. I looked in the bed and he was laying there among the bedclothes. They were so filthy. I said, what do you want with me . He immediately pulled me down into the bed and 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 father. They couldnt do anything about it. Theyd get killed if they said something about it. Many times girls would talk in the bathroom about it. Never telling our parents. But it happened very very frequently. The tenuousness of black lives in mississippi left more than physical scars. It also left deep psychological wounds. I was fascinated by people like david and goliath stories. They were my favorite biblical characters, the cats who kicked folks butts. Or moses drowning everybody. I used to go in the woods, and preach, and scream, and run into bushes, kick trees and pretend they were white folks. You learn how to negotiate your life with white folks. And i guess you also learn the fear of associating with them, how much power they have over you, how they could determine whether you continued to live, or whether you died. Danielle after two decades of black womens brave testimony in mississippi, and Community Efforts to protect them from white Sexual Violence, a jury sentenced norman cannon, a white man to life in prison for raping a black teenager in 1965. Major newspapers hailed it as a sign that even mississippi was finally making serious changes. Like the montgomery movement, the 1965 Selma Campaign has an important prehistory rooted in sexualized violence that historians have not yet explored. After the 1964 freedom summer, federal intervention and congressional action left segregationists reeling. In selma, the staunchest supporters of segregation used the fear of interracial sex and the rhetoric of rape to resuscitate and revive jim crow. They used the sexual mccarthyism to discredit the Voting Rights act and to defame the demonstrators who risk their lives in the march. Civil rights activists were no longer just outside agitators. Or communists. Now they were sexual thieves. Intent on spreading sexual depravity. It was within that storm and because of that the ku klux klan murdered viola, a white house wife who defied racial and gender mores by embracing the black struggle. Her accusers accused her of embracing black men. We change the historical markers of the movement. While the Voting Rights act is often referenced as the bookend of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the last barriers to black womens bodily integrity fell in 1967. They banned laws preventing interracial marriages and loving versus virginia. It was rooted in those colonial era laws i mentioned, and the ban was one of the last vestiges of slavery to fall. Only by placing the loving decision within the long struggle for black womens bodily integrity and freedom from terror can it be properly recognized as a major marker in the Civil Rights Movement. The right of black women to defend themselves from Sexual Violence was tested in the 1975 trial of joann little. She was a petite 20yearold africanamerican inmate in the Beaufort County jail in washington, North Carolina. One night in august, the 62yearold sheriff entered her cell. He threatened her with an ice pick and sexually assaulted her. During the attack, she managed to grab the ice pick and proceeded to stab him to death. As she prepared for trial for murder, supporters from the National Organization of women, to the black Panther Party rally ied to her defense. The free joann movement mirrored the eclectic organization that formed to protect recy taylor in 1944. The free joann Little Movement was led primarily by africanamerican women. In detroit, the free joann Little Movement was led by rosa parks. At her trial, Defense Attorneys tried to paint her as a black jezebel. The attacked her credibility, and portrayed her as a prostitute. They suggested she actually wanted to have sex with the jailer, that she seduced him and killed him in an elaborate plot to escape. Her attorney set her story in a much longer context. He read to the jury from an to essay decrying the lack of protection for black womanhood and the vulnerability in the system where white man could abuse them. By pointing to decades of abuse in the past, he bore witness to black womens tradition of testimony and their attempt for dignity. After deliberating for over an hour, the jury unanimously voted to acquit joann little of murder. As the jury foreman read the verdict she broke into sobs as her lawyers clustered around her. Perhaps channeling mccrae who wondered if black women had achieved emancipation, she said it feels good to be free. This cartoon hailed the verdict as a major victory. Here she is portrayed as a boxer. Hoisting her gloved fist into the air, her attorneys proclaiming victory for their champ and a triumph over jim crow racism. Looking tired and overweight, in his 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 we are going to provide what is called a truly loaded Cost Accounting of White Supremacy, we have to include analyses of Sexual Violence and rape, testimony and protests that remain at the volatile core of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Thank you for coming tonight. [applause] now we have ambient sound. I thought it was time for ambient sound. [laughter] here in the red. What was it that got you onto this research in the beginning . Danielle great question. It was 1998, i was a master student at the university of wisconsin. I was helping my professor clean his office. That is what i was paid to do as his assistant. We were listening to npr and heard joe azbell talk about Gertrude Perkins. I said, who the heck is Gertrude Perkins . It was so shocking to me that he thought she had something to do with the montgomery bus boycott. I felt compelled to go to the archives and dig up old newspapers, and read about Gertrude Perkins. I found the story, and i didnt know what to do with it. It was the first story i had found about this issue, about Sexual Violence in the south. There was no way to connect it to the montgomery bus boycott. I put it aside and didnt really know what to do with it. A couple months later i was working on the tallahassee case. My professor said, this is an interesting story. Why dont you look at this . I said ok. I started to look into that case. And i did that for a masters thesis. I put it aside. I finished my masters and went to work for two years and didnt know what to do with it. When i came back to graduate school, i said, there has to be more to this. I have read about this stuff happening in slavery and i dont know if it ended during after the period after slavery. I started reading black newspapers. They have the stories plastered all over them. I was shocked as a graduate student that i had been reading all these history books and none of them talked about what was on the front pages of black newspapers for a decade. I started doing more and more research and slowly but surely little puzzle pieces started to tell me 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, what other sources of data did you have . Danielle thank you. I did interview a number of people. In fact, i was lucky to interview recy taylor, the woman who was raped. She will be 91 years old this year. She is still alive. And she is waiting for justice. She is still waiting for justice. I felt very blessed to be able to talk to her. I interviewed a number of other women in birmingham and a handful of people in montgomery. I used a lot of interviews that i found in the archives, where the historians may have asked questions and talked about what happened but they never followed up. I looked at Court Documents and tried to get court proceedings, trial transcripts and stuff like that. I got a lot of material on the tallahassee case in that regard. I talked to old attorneys on some cases. I have not spoken to any of the assailants. A couple are still in prison for other crimes. But i was sort of afraid to talk to them. It was a lot of digging. Through the archives, old newspapers, and talking to people on the ground. Did the white wives get upset enough with their husbands that that would stop the rapes, or not . Not that i found. It wasnt a focus of my inquiry. I do think white womens silence made them somewhat complicit in these cases. You see that during slavery in particular. There were white women who organized, who really called out the use of the myth of the black beast as rapist to protect white womanhood. They said, we are tired of you using this tactic in our name. You cannot use it any longer. It is not about us. This is about you. There were women who spoke out, but most white women kept their mouth shut. Thank you. Thank you for your work. It is so intriguing. And so rich. I am curious, my mother was born of an assault by a rape. Her family, she was in aberdeen, mississippi. The family fled to cleveland as part of the great migration. I would like to know whether there was any exploration of children born as a result of this Sexual Violence and how the women themselves and their families dealt with them. Danielle thank you. Im really sorry to hear that. That story is very common. A lot of women i spoke to will tell that story. Particularly about their grandmothers. The cases i studied, as far as i know did not result in any children. But a lot of the black women who were attacked left town. And then often came back home. Recy taylor did not leave. She stayed where her family was under Death Threats regularly. Her father, she moved in with her father and he stayed up at night perched in the branches of an old tree with shells and a shotgun. A lot of women left the south as part of the great migration because this was one of those push factors, Sexual Violence. A lot of people stayed. For as many women who testified about these crimes, many more remained silent and buried the story, and kept on with their daily lives. Never expecting justice, hoping to continue along with their daily activities. That is what recy taylor did in many ways. Betty jean owens left town for a while and then went back. Some other women that ive written about, sometimes their stories end in the archives and you dont hear back from them, you dont know what happened for sure. Its kind of up in the air. But the story is not surprising. Very common. I would like to hear more about rosa parks. You said she was one of the best investigators. What was her rest of her life like in her investigation story, and what did she say about her feet being tired at the time . She protested that statement. She said the only tired i was was tired of being mistreated. That is not new history. Rosa parks, her activist history is well known, i think, for scholars of the Civil Rights Movement. The popular presentation is still as this matronly seamstress, as if she didnt do anything else except sew Peoples Clothing all day with tired feet. She worked as a secretary of the montgomery naacp through the montgomery bus boycott. She didnt just take notes during meetings. She was a detective. She traveled the dusty back roads of alabama often at great risk to document the crimes committed against africanamericans. She would take those stories back to montgomery where she and edie nixon and other people would decide whether or not to launch a campaign or bring legal charges. They used a cruel triage to figure out which cases could be used as a public protest, and which cases they had to keep quiet. Politics is the art of the possible. They had to figure out which cases were politically possible to bring forward and launch a Public Campaign against. She was raised to believe in black power and black nationalism. Her grandfather believed in armed selfdefense and so did she. She spoke at the funeral of robert williams. We forget about that rosa parks, who would give a eulogy for a man who stood up for arms selfdefense and was decried during the 1960s for his militancy. She married a man who carried a pistol around town and was one of the earliest organizers of the montgomery naacp, and a defender of the scottsboro youth put on trial in jail for many years accused of raping white women on an alabama freight train. She did a lot of things. Often her story ends after the bus boycott but she marched in almost every Major Campaign of the Civil Rights Movement, and then continued her activism in detroit where as i noted, she basically headed the Detroit Branch of the free joann little committee. So you hear she is continuing to do antirape activism. At a time now everyone thinks it is popular because the Womens Movement has made speak outs feasible. But she had been doing it for a long time. Shes much more interesting than textbooks portray her as. And much more militant. She is a radical in her own right. We do her and ourselves a disservice i really really tired rosa parks and not the militant rosa parks. Thank you for writing this book. I graduated from Langston University in 1966. Were there two or three men found with her, yet she was killed and they didnt bother the rest of them . Mrs. Leroux so, she was killed. Worth or two or three other young men at the time . Danielle she was in the car with a man, he pretended he was dead to save himself, and the clan members who murdered her from their car window, they were in a highspeed chase, they shot at her, they murdered her, her car veered off the side of the road. They got out of the car and went to the car to make sure both passengers were dead. He laid as still as a stone in order to make them believe he was dead. As soon as the car pulled away he jumped up and tried to flag down the next car, a car load of activists. There were other martyrs but that was her and leroy. Thank you very much for this refreshing perspective on the Civil Rights Movement. One of the things that drew me here tonight, to come to this is the title of your book. As a historian myself, i know that some of the hardest things to do in terms of writing history is to decide on a title. You want your title to be catching you, to be attractive. I like the fact that you point to a new history of the Civil Rights Movement. What i also wondered about your decision of using rosa parks, instead of recy taylor, if you thought about that, if it crossed your mind to say from recy taylor to the rise of black power. Rosa parks still serves that purpose of drawing us to the familiar. Once you got us there, you come up with that. Danielle ill be very honest. The top part of the title was mine and mine alone. I picked that. My editor chose this subtitle. We worked on it together but i wanted it to just be black women, rape and resistance. She said no, it has to be more than that. We ended up with this long title. It takes two minutes to say out loud and takes up the entire cover of the book. I ended up liking it because it explains what the book was about and it did what you said, what could this be . It drew people in. Recy taylor is on the cover. That is her. Another question . They will come with the microphone. What about joann little . Danielle she was an inmate, a criminal. She had a pretty shady history. Most in her community didnt like her. Her parents had a hard time with her. She wasnt the kind of person that people wanted to rally around. She was no rosa parks. The attorneys in her case had to work really hard to present her as a respectable woman who was acting in selfdefense as opposed to a premeditated escape plan. For a while she did some speaking engagements with the black Panther Party, then she kind of drifted off, and very few people heard from her again. She was late for appointments, theres an article in the 80s of her being arrested with a sawed off shotgun in her car. In brooklyn, new york. And that is that. The archival trail ends. I dont know what happened to her since then. I struggled hard with her case. Almost all the other women i have worked on, and whose testimonies i have read, i believed. In my core. I wondered for a long time whether or not joann little was telling the truth. Whether or not she was a protagonist i could get behind. Ultimately i think listening to her testimony, and listening to her attorneys talk about her, and reading the transcripts, i believed her. I dont think that she could have gone up there and pretended her way out of that murder case. She was smart and sly, and had a little bit of a criminal mind. But she wasnt making this up. The trial transcript made that clear. Im grateful they are Still Available and the judge notes are there. She was an interesting case. [inaudible] i dont know the name. It is probably in my footnotes. I cant remember the title of it. A history of black women in america. Danielle Something Like that. It is in my footnotes. It is an older book but it is full of good information. A good primary source document. Can you quantify or measure in some way what extent this oppression of black women and violence against them by white people, how much that influence the Civil Rights Movement, did it make it happen sooner or more widespread, more forcefully . Can you give us some insight . Danielle i think that these cases, and public protests was prominent in the 1940s. They kind of, when Something Like this happens, a lot of leftist and liberal organizations rally to promote these cases as examples of southern brutality. And examples of unamerican behavior, particularly at a time when the United States was at war in europe. These cases were useful political tools and africanamericans recognized the deep chasm between the rhetoric and reality of jim crow. By the 1950s when the politics shifted, and there was this brutal white backlash, it made it much more difficult for africanamericans and liberal and leftist organizations to promote these cases as propaganda cases to highlight southern injustice. What i found is these cases sort of ebbed and flowed in terms of public knowledge, and public propaganda. But that they on the ground, they served to motivate people to not only join the naacp but often to form a branch of the naacp. What these stories told me was more about what local people, what ordinary people were concerned about on a daytoday 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 couldnt walk home from church if you were abducted and assaulted . Some of this is about what ordinary local people needed to accomplish daily. I think that where it sparked civil rights campaigns, it did so in the form of a catalyst. As you went through this work, thinking about the world that we live in today, do you find any resonance of what you studied for the world we are living in now . Danielle sure. To understand the way that black women are portrayed in popular media, wed understand this history. They are objectified and subjugated, bodies are sexualized, overly sexualized, by everyone. And, that sexualization, if we look at the way Michelle Obama is treated today, there is a focus on her body in a way that i dont remember anyone talking about other first ladies bodies, maybe because they were not as toned. There has been a lot of complaints about her, acting uppity, stepping out of her place. Have you ever heard of other first ladies being criticized for meeting with dignitaries . She caught a lot if heat for doing that. Not because she went on vacation in spain, but i think that what people were saying was that she was playing the lady. And that that was not appropriate for a black woman. It echoed a lot of complaints that i have seen in reconstruction era newspapers and historical studies of the reconstruction which black women who took off the slave uniform and put on a fancy dress were accused of playing the lady. I think there is a lot of resonance in how these stereotypes of black women, and objectification of their bodies is continued to this day. [inaudible] it is all over hiphop, unfortunately. That is why it is not just black women seem to be equal opportunity, equally objectified by lots of different people at this point. You see it most explicitly right now in rap videos. The gentleman asked the question i was going to ask, but based on your insight, i wondered what you think of the duclos cross case. If you looked into that at all, or if you had a different perspective . Danielle i was in the thick of this research when that happened. The first time i read it i said oh boy, ive heard this story before. A lot. Ill be honest. My immediate thought was that they were guilty. That they did this, that it was part of a longstanding practice, especially among fraternity men. Athletes were not immune from objectifying women. It smacked of the kind of case study i have been working on. I jumped to conclusions. But the more i read the more i thought there is something not right with this story. Not sure what it is. I refrained from talking about it with most people until i figured out what really happened. The conclusion i have come to, it hasnt really been on my mind. No matter what happened that night, and no matter what drove those women to be dancers, why were College Athletes hiring black women to strip for them as entertainment . I thought it was disgusting. It smacked of White Privilege and of this southern history. And American History, really, so that is what i thought. No matter what happened, something really wrong went down. With all the reports of rape now being used as a weapon of war, particularly in the democratic republic of congo, are you seeing similarities, although the racial component may not be the same . Danielle not as voracious of attacks as we see around the world, but i think that what i have learned from looking at from looking at these cases in the democratic republic of the it has alwaysa, been used as a weapon of terror. It continues to be used as a weapon of terror. It surprises me more that we have not written or talked about kind ofrms of the racial terrorism happening in the United States. A truth and Reconciliation Committee or committees to cleanse ourselves of the past, be upfront and to at, so we can move on brighter future. If south africa can do it, we can do it. It was interesting hearing you talk about the militant figures. Wondering if being a part of the nonviolent civil rights any t where there was there any tension with her being nonviolent and having a different set of ideas . The myth that everyone in the Civil Rights Movement was nonviolent and they adhere to gandhian principles. If you talk to black southerners and read civil rights history books, most people had guns. Farmers in general americans, speaking, like their dunce. Black people are not alien, they are americans. Peopleere reports of having guns and defending themselves, particularly blacks living in rural areas. You could not betray yourself as a gun toting madman to the public media in the 1950s. You would be sent to mccarthys committee and blacklisted, deported somewhere. Jail. What happened is that africanamericans in the Summer Campaign and birmingham, they decided to adhere to nonviolence when they were marching. They put their guns away for but their guns away for those moments. Oftentimes the people we associate most with nonviolence like dr. King, he often had armed bodyguards surrounding his home. Glenn smiley, from i think it is the fellowship of reconciliation, went to visit Martin Luther king in the early days of the montgomery bus boycott. Before king had decided on being gandhian. He wrote back and said, this place is an arsenal. He had so many guns around the house, and they convinced him not to do it great its a mess, i think. It. Its a mess, i think. Other questions . Thank you all so much for coming. [applause] there is so much to do. There is so much coming at you that there is no time to think or reflect. Hi, everyone. We are digging up the soil because we are going to plant a garden. Will not beband satisfied until every military veteran and spouse that once a job has one. At the end of the day my most important title is still momi nchief. Michelle obama became the first africanamerican first lady when her husband was elected president. Her focus has been on social issues like poverty and healthy eating. Michelle obama at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on first ladies influence and image. Examining the public and private lives of first ladies and their influence on the presidency. Tonight on American History tv on cspan3. Coming up next on American History tv, historian and author Douglas Charles discusses his book, hoovers war on gays. The fbi accumulated more than 330,000 pages on socalled sex deviants. These files were destroyed in 1977 and 1978. Professor charles discusses his research into the history of the program and the public and official perception of gays during hoovers time at the fbi. The 55 Minute Program is cohosted by the national the gay at kansas city, and lesbians archives of midamerica, and the Truman Center at the university of missouri. J edgar hoover. When one hears his name, two images easily come to mind. The first is the long serving fbi