At The Dark End Of The Street Analysis

Words: 777
Pages: 4

At the Dark End of the Street begins by depicting the serial rape of Recy Taylor by 7 white men. Rosa Parks helped Recy and a couple of organizations even supported them, bringing the case into the public consciousness. Recy did not get justice, her assailants got off without reproach. This is a constant theme throughout most of the book. The book then details the sentiments at the time about black veterans coming back and wanting to be treated as equals. White people responded with hostility. On the buses, there was no shortage of it. The drivers themselves hardly hesitated to smack black women or drive past them altogether. Women were tired of it. Among the women who remained seated and subsequently got arrested was Rosa Parks. Five days later, a one-day bus boycott was held; the beginning of the Montgomery boycott movement. After years of letting white men off the hook for raping black women, Judge Brady sentenced a man for 20 years not because the rape was terrible, but because having sex with a black woman made him unworthy of being white. This was followed by Betty Jean Owen’s rapists being sent to prison for life because rape is bad. …show more content…
In my case, it made me consider the implications of those such phrases in more depth than I might have if they had only been mentioned once or twice. One term was that of the ‘good nigger,’ which the author made clear with repetition meant that the black person in question ‘knew their place’ and didn’t try to be treated as an equal to the white man. Another phrase is the one about the ‘black beast rapists’ who is apparently just a huge, lumbering, black male animal who will club and rape every single white woman who has ever existed. This was the boogeyman that white people consistently fell back onto when it was just white men who didn’t want ‘their’ women (because women are property) pairing off with black