The Civil Rights movement can be described as a struggle, a revolution, or a change. The journey for African-Americans to be granted justice during the Civil Rights movement, however, can be described as sickening. In Danielle McGuire's book At the Dark End of the Street, far too many accounts of rape, murder, and cruelty were explored to show the horrors experienced by blacks in the south. While reading At the Dark End of the Street, one word comes to mind: sickening. More specifically, the events regarding the treatment of African-Americans in a courtroom trying to defend themselves and their bodies are sickening. .
On September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old sharecropper and mother, would begin a long fight for justice regarding bodily integrity of African-American women in the south, more specifically in her town of Abbeville, Alabama. Taylor, Fannie Daniel, and Fannie's son, West, were approached by a private in the U.S. Army, who was accompanied by six other men armed with weapons, ordered the trio to stop. The men accused Taylor of "[cutting] [a] white boy in Clopton [that] evening. " (xvi). Daniel, speaking the truth, tried to set the men straight by giving an alibi to Taylor to justify that they were accusing the wrong woman. However, the men heard none of it and took Taylor and threw her in the back of a green Chevrolet sedan. The Chevrolet, then, drove off into the night where the men proceeded to rape Taylor, all while using the threat of violence and their abused authority to dominate the situation. .
Fannie Daniel reported the assault and kidnapping to the police, where George Gamble, the county sheriff, began an investigation. Daniel's son, West, identified the Chevrolet and Gamble brought in Hugo Wilson, his father, and the green sedan (8). Recy Taylor acknowledged Wilson as one of the rapists and Sheriff Gamble proceeded to take Wilson to the county jail.
