In her groundbreaking and important book, Danielle L. McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year old mother, wife and sharecropper as she strolled home from a night of praying and singing at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama.  Rosa Parks was an investigator who was sent to Abbeville to investigate the brutal beating and rape case of Recy Taylor long before the bus boycott. Danielle gives new insight on the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began.  Black women protesting the continual  sexual assault and interracial rape added fuel to the civil right campaigns in the South. The Montgomery bus boycott was not the birth of the struggle for civil rights. 

At the Dark End of the Street describes the decades of black women who fell victim to degradation in the city of Montgomery as they rode buses on their way to work in the homes of white people where they cooked and cleaned for white employers. Listen to the author's interview as she discusses this controversial, moving and courageous book.

Sex is the principle around which the whole structure of segregation . . . is organized.