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

In Chapter 8, McGuire describes the trial of Joan Little, which occurred in North Carolina in 1974. Nearly 10 years after such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act passed, the South had yet to fully implement integration. A “white backlash” occurred throughout the South in the late 1960s, and many Southerners supported the openly racist George Wallace in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections (205).

Amid these ongoing racial tensions was the case of Joan Little in the rural town of Washington, North Carolina. In August 1974, the imprisoned Little murdered her jailer, Clarence Alligood, with an ice pick before escaping from jail. While the police believed Little had plotted to kill Alligood, she maintained that she killed him in self-defense after he raped her. While on the run, Little was put in touch with white civil rights attorney Jerry Paul, who “helped her surrender” and planned to defend her in the ensuing trial (203).

In the months leading up to the trial, Paul continually publicized Little’s case, portraying it as part of a long history of racialized sexual violence in the South. Little’s story resonated with both civil rights activists and feminist activists, who launched anti-rape campaigns throughout the early 1970s. After Angela Davis published an article about Little in the women’s magazine Ms., Little’s case received national attention. Organizations began forming throughout the country to raise money for her legal fund. The prosecution, meanwhile, attempted to slander Little’s reputation, focusing on her previous arrests for armed robberies and describing her as a “sexually deviant delinquent” (210).

Before the start of the trial, Paul successfully argued that it must be moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, because the media attention surrounding the trial made it impossible to find an unbiased jury in Washington. Paul also hired a group of social scientists to argue that a fair jury must include individuals from diverse backgrounds. Usually, juries in the South were all white and all male. Paul’s defense of Little focused on asking Little’s fellow female inmates to testify that Alligood and other jailers sexually harassed other female inmates.

When Little took the stand, she described every moment of her rape in exhaustive detail, as well as the fear she felt throughout it. In the closing argument, Paul read aloud from a text written by an anonymous Black woman in 1902, which described the ways Black women were unfairly treated by white men. Paul’s appeal to the long history of racism in the South was successful. The “jury unanimously voted to acquit Joan Little” (225). The successful defense of Little was seen by many as an affirmation of recent feminist attempts “to redefine rape as a crime of violence,” as well as a step toward full racial equality in the South (226).

In the Epilogue, McGuire describes her meeting with Recy Taylor in 2009, whose rape by six white men in Abbeville, Alabama, is described in Chapter 1. McGuire spoke with Taylor in Abbeville on the same day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as “the country’s first black president” (229). Taylor only left Abbeville for a few years and otherwise lived near her rapists for her entire life.

McGuire spoke with many of Taylor’s family members, who described how the trauma of Taylor’s rape affected their lives. For years after the trial, Taylor lived in fear that her rapists would kill her in retaliation for reporting their crime. Taylor’s father was furious with the police over their treatment of Taylor, though he never directly confronted them due to his fears of being lynched. While Taylor’s family and many Black residents vividly remembered the trial, Abbeville’s white community denied that the rape ever occurred.

McGuire closes the Epilogue by describing Taylor watching Michelle Obama at the inauguration. McGuire suggests that Michelle Obama’s ability to become the First Lady was largely due to the work of numerous Black women such as Taylor, whose decades-long fight against white supremacy and sexual violence remains unacknowledged.