'Dark End of the Street' Author to Speak at UK

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jan. 26, 2015) — The historic rape of black women by white men helped launch the civil rights movement, according to a recent book by Danielle McGuire, associate professor at Wayne State University, titled “At the Dark End of the Street.” McGuire’s book declares that black women’s protests fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South and cites the important role Rosa Parks played in these protests as an NAACP investigator.

McGuire will visit the University of Kentucky campus to discuss her book on Feb. 5. A reception will begin at 6 p.m. in the Alumni Gallery of the William T. Young Library, followed immediately by the lecture at 6:30 p.m. in the library’s UK Athletics Association Auditorium. The lecture is co-hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences departments of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) and African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) and the Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women (OPSVAW). The lecture is a celebration of GWS and AAAS becoming formal affiliates of the OPSVAW. Their unique, but often shared, missions have brought them together as affiliates, and inspired the lecture.

“I am so honored to have the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the African American and Africana Studies Program join the Department of Psychology and the Department of Political Science as affiliates to our program,” said Carol E. Jordan, executive director of the Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women. “Our joint effort to bring Dr. McGuire to campus is a perfect exemplar of our intertwined missions and our interest in advancing substantive conversations in the area of racial and gendered violence.” 

“The partnership we have created with the OPSVAW is an excellent opportunity for our faculty and students to access additional resources and share expertise on issues related to gendered violence,” said Karen Tice, chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. “We are very excited to have this opportunity to bring Dr. McGuire to campus to talk about how sexualized racial violence played a major role in sparking civil rights activism.”

“Dr. McGuire’s work is well known among our faculty, and we are pleased to join our partners in welcoming her to campus,” said Melynda Price, director of the African American and Africana Studies Program.  “Her work toward continuing to explore all dimensions of the civil rights movement and those it impacted the most is a substantial contribution.” 

Danielle McGuire is an award-winning author and associate professor in the history department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is the recipient of the 2011 Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Her dissertation on sexualized racial violence and the African-American freedom struggle received the 2008 Lerner Scott Prize for best dissertation in women’s history. Her essay “It Was Like We Were All Raped: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization and the African American Freedom Struggle,” published in the Journal of American History, won the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best essay in southern women’s history and was reprinted in the Best Essays in American History 2006.

McGuire is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has appeared on National Public Radio and BookTV (CSPAN). Her essays have appeared on the Huffington Post, TheGrio.com and TheRoot.com.

McGuire's first authored book, “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,” was published by Knopf in 2010. Her second book project will investigate the ways in which ordinary people experienced the 1967 Detroit racial uprising. She will use the murder of three African-American men by police at the Algiers Motel and their subsequent trials as the main narrative thread to investigate larger themes central to the uprising, especially police brutality and racial discrimination in the urban North. In 2011, she also co-authored an edited book titled “Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement” with the University Press of Kentucky.

For more information on the lecture or the co-hosts, contact: Karen Tice, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, karen.tice@uky.edu; Melynda Price, African American and Africana Studies Program, melynda.price1@uky.edu; and Carol E. Jordan, Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women, carol.jordan@uky.edu

MEDIA CONTACT: Gail Hairston, 859-257-3302, gail.hairston@uky.edu