Civil Rights Movement & Racism Books | Author- Danielle McGuire

In 1967, Police murdered 3 Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel in Detroit. In 2024, a historical marker was dedicated in their honor.
Posted on August 29, 2024
Posted in Murder in the Motor City, Uncategorized
Algiers Motel, Auburey Pollard, Carl Cooper, Fred Temple, Lee Forsythe
A police killing. A coverup. And a history of silence.
Posted on August 25, 2021
Posted in Murder in the Motor City
Happy 100th Birthday, Recy Taylor!
Posted on December 30, 2019
Posted in Civil Rights Movement, History, Recy Taylor
Black Women, MeToo, Rape, Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks
Letters for Betty Jean Owens
Posted on October 25, 2018
Posted in Betty Jean Owens, Civil Rights Movement, Current Events, History, Uncategorized
Betty Jean Owens
Landmark 1959 rape case in Tallahassee, Florida was central to the Civil Rights Movement
Posted on March 1, 2018
Posted in Betty Jean Owens, Civil Rights Movement, History, Rape
Civil Rights Movement, FAMU, Rape, Tallahassee
Recy Taylor honored by Congressional Black Caucus
Posted on February 13, 2018
Posted in Civil Rights Movement, Rape, Recy Taylor
Marginalized Women, like Shawana Hall, are Still the Most Vulnerable to Sexual Violence and Rape
Posted on January 16, 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
Recy Taylor and How the Civil Rights Movement is Rooted in Resistance to Rape
Posted on January 16, 2018
Posted in History, Recy Taylor
Civil Rights Movement, Rape, Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks, sexual violence

Danielle McGuire, PhD, is an award-winning Civil Rights historian, public speaker and author of 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 (Knopf). She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has appeared on PBS, CNN, MSNBC, Headline News, National Public Radio, and BookTV. Her popular essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Detroit Free Press, Bridge Magazine, Washington Post, Huffington Post and CNN.com. She serves as a consultant on documentary films such as The Rape of Recy Taylor and You Belong to Me: The Ruby McCollum Story. She also helps curate educational historical tours and civil rights-related curricula for secondary schools and serves on the advisory board of History Studio. She is currently at work on a book about police violence in Detroit in 1967, to be published by Knopf.

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Current Project:

Murder in the Motor City: The 1967 Detroit Riot and American Injustice

The story of the Algiers Motel murders and subsequent trials, the main narrative thread of Murder in the Motor City, captures, in its tragic horror, the often hidden infrastructure of northern racism and white supremacy. From rabid residential segregation and job discrimination to racialized and sexual violence to ecumenic and educational disparities and the everyday injustices and biased sentencing in the judicial system, racial inequality and segregation in Detroit was every bit as virulent as it was in the South. Maybe even worse.

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Recent Blog Posts

In 1967, Police murdered 3 Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel in Detroit. In 2024, a historical marker was dedicated in their honor.

A historical marker and a memorial to the victims of police violence Survivors and victims’ family members gathered together on July 26, 2024 for the dedication of the Algiers Motel historical marker. 57 years earlier, on July 26, 1967, three Detroit policemen and a private guard raided the Algiers Motel on the third night of…

A police killing. A coverup. And a history of silence.

No headstone marks William “Billy” Dalton’s gravesite. His childhood home on Fernwood Street, once part of a vibrant, working-class Black neighborhood, was razed to build the Jeffries Freeway. The former parking lot of Wild’s Cleaner’s on the corner of Grand River and Edmonton, where Detroit Police officer Ronald F. Karchefski shot and killed the 19-year-old…

Happy 100th Birthday, Recy Taylor!

Happy 100th Birthday, Recy Taylor! Recy Taylor was born on New Year’s Eve in 1919, a crucible of violence & resistance. It was the year of the “Red Summer” when white terrorists rampaged through black towns and across the country in an orgy of violence. WEB DuBois said “We return from fighting. We return fighting.”…

Letters for Betty Jean Owens

Last night I spoke with Betty Jean Owens’s grandson, Amonte Martin. He and I talked over the past decade–first when my Journal of American History article came out and since my book was released in 2010. We chatted about history, family and especially the health and well-being of his grandmother, Betty Jean Owens, who was…

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Published Works

Reviews

Praise for Danielle McGuire’s most recent book: At the Dark End of the Street

Ms. Magazine
McGuire’s provocative narrative forces readers to rethink what they know about that pivotal moment in U.S. history: its time frame, its actors, its legacy.
Nell Irvin Painter
Following the lead of pioneers like Darlene Clark Hine, Danielle McGuire details the all too ignored tactic of rape of black women in the everyday practice of southern white supremacy. Just as important, she plots resistance against this outrage as an integral facet of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This book is as essential as its history is infuriating.
Diane McWhorter
Just when we thought there couldn’t possibly be anything left to uncover about the civil rights movement, Danielle McGuire finds a new facet of that endlessly prismatic struggle at the core of our national identity. By reinterpreting black liberation through the lens of organized resistance to white male sexual aggression against African-American women, McGuire ingeniously upends the white race’s ultimate rationale for its violent subjugation of blacks—imputed black male sexual aggression against white women. It is an original premise, and At the Dark End of the Street delivers on it with scholarly authority and narrative polish.
Publisher’s Weekly
McGuire’s “new history” shines fresh light upon the germinal role of black women in the birth and development of the civil rights movement.
Kevin Boyle
At the Dark End of the Street is one of those rare studies that makes a well-known story seem startlingly new. Anyone who thinks he knows the history of the modern civil rights movement needs to read this terrifying, illuminating book.
Timothy B. Tyson
This gripping story changes the history books, giving us a revised Rosa Parks and a new civil rights story. You can’t write a general U.S. history without altering crucial sentences because of McGuire’s work. Masterfully narrated, At the Dark End of the Street presents a deep civil rights movement with women at the center, a narrative as poignant, painful and complicated as our own lives.