Summary[]
This book centralizes rape/sexual violence in the Civil Rights Movement. It is a "new history of the civil rights movement," one that surveys black women's resistance to sexual violence over roughly a thirty-year span, from 1944 to 1975. Interracial Rape was used as a means to uphold white patriarchal power and ”was deployed as a justification for lynching black men who challenged the Southern status quo.” (xviii). Sex was the means to maintain the South’s racial hierarchy and underscored the extent to which whites fought to preserve it. McGuire argues that decades before radical feminists in the women’s movement urged rape survivors to ‘speak out,’ “African-American women’s public protests galvanized local, national, and even international outrage and sparked larger campaigns for racial justice and human dignity.” (XX). Interracial rape was the cause of their protests. The famous civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, NC; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; and Hattiesburg, Mississippi “had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood. The Montgomery Improvement Association, for example, was built upon the organizing efforts of black women trying to combat sexual violence. Montgomery movement, McGuire contends, was a women’s movement for dignity. Moreover, Love v. Virginia becomes an even greater landmark decision when placed in the broader story of the civil rights movement and sexual violence