Clergy Sexual Misconduct

the power of three sentences: the Eddie long case and what’s not being said

I was fixin to leave the office and go home for the night (fixin' as in preparin/getting ready to/making my intentions) when I ran across Rev. Dr. Monica Coleman's article below. I am interested in the Eddie Long Case for several reasons: 1. those of you that know me know I did my dissertation on clergy sexual misconduct; 2. Long has been virulent in his opposition to homosexuality and I was curious if the passion was a camouflage and 3. In January I will be teaching a class titled, Professional Ministerial Boundaries. I suspect this case will sadly provide rich fodder for my students.

Read what our Rev. Dr. Sista Monica Coleman has to say about the situation.

Q. Where in your life can you stand to examine how you wield your power and authority so that you are careful not to be callous, careless and disrepectful of the humanity and rights of others to live safely and without violence?
Blessings! Rev. Qiyamah

the power of three sentences: the Eddie long case and what’s not being said

I apologize in advance to those who normally follow my blog, Beautiful Mind Blog. I usually focus the blog on the intersection of depression and faith with a new entry at least once a week. Nevertheless, the firestorm around the allegations of sexual misconduct by Atlanta pastor Bishop Eddie Long compel me to break the silence I’ve kept in the last week.

In short, Bishop Eddie Long, leader of the 25,0000 member Atlanta-based church, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, is being sued in civil court by four different young men (in their early twenties) who are (former) members of his church. They accuse him of coercing them into having sexual relations with them when they were around 17 years old.

There are so many issues at work here. Many friends and colleagues have posted amazing blogs and commentaries about some of the issues surrounding what is now being called “The Eddie Long case.” Dr. Yolanda Pierce of Princeton Theological Seminary reminds us that pastors are servants, not kings. She also highlights the poverty of a prosperity theology. Dr. Jonathan Walton of Harvard Divinity School talks about what happens when churches conform to the motifs of wider celebrity culture. Dr. Shayne Lee of Tulane University brings his expertise on megachurches and market forces to bear on the kinds of issues that Long now faces. In light of Long’s history of virulent homophobia and the gender of the accusers, Dr. Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania reminds us that homophobia in black churches must be addressed. Saida Grundy and Atlanta activist Craig Washington indicate that Eddie Long may now be having to bear the consequences of his dangerous rhetoric about homosexuality. Dr. Kathi Martin of Interactive Faith Café says that the time is ripe for Long and others in church communities to choose love and justice over exclusion and condemnation. Years ago, I wrote about Long’s (mis)use of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy in the fifth chapter of my book, Making a Way Out of No Way. Many of us say these things out of a deep love for and years of scholarship on African American religious culture. We also mention these issues while acknowledging, as Ted Haggard does, that we do not know what happened and that Long deserves a fair trial.

These are all poignant responses, and I agree with many of them. It’s difficult not to comment on the challenges – even problematic nature – of black church homophobia, possible hypocrisy, prosperity theology, and the corporate and celebrity culture of churches. I’m adding my voice to the commentary because of what I have not heard addressed.

I have not heard enough people talk about what I see at the heart of this matter:
the possibility of clergy sexual misconduct

With my colleagues, I cannot say whether or not Eddie Long is guilty of the allegations. I can say that the Eddie Long Case has the opportunity to raise all of our consciousnesses about clergy sexual misconduct. When we remember this, the charges against Long are less about homosexuality, the defensiveness of his congregation, the theology he espouses, or the age and gender of the accusers. The case is about the possible abuse of clerical power.

As a clergy person, I well understand the power people often afford to ministers and priests. Most clergy I know are doing their best to live out God’s callings in their local communities and spheres of influence. At some point, we realize that because we address one of the most intimate, fragile and resilient aspects of people lives – their faith – people ascribe great power to us. They listen to what we say. They ask our opinions on all types of matters. They believe we know something holier than the average person. Most clergy I know are frightened by this power, as we try to handle it as responsibly as we can.

As a public theologian and professor of theology, I know that what we think about God matters in the kind of existence we live out. I know that many churched people learn about God almost exclusively at the hands of their pastors and preachers. The average Christian has not read the entire Bible, nor is she aware of the diversity of theological beliefs that have always existed within Christianity. Many Christians understand a questioning of religious matters and religious leaders to be an attack on one’s faith. While I lament that individuals tend to place so much stock in one person, it also calls clergy to a higher level of accountability in their theologies and in their lives.

As someone who has publicly spoken out against sexual violence for the last 14 years, I know that sexual abuse is always about power. The combination of clergy power and authority mean that clergy are in positions where people trust us deeply. When clergy engage in sexual relations – no matter how voluntary – with people with less power than us, it is an abuse of power.

To put it another way: Laity are often in a vulnerable position in relationship to clergy. Lay people come to clergy with their deepest needs, in times of crisis, and/or when they are emotionally insecure. The emotional and spiritual power is not parallel, and thus the person with less power cannot give “meaningful consent” to a sexual relationship. Such sexual contact is a violation of professional ethics (the same kind often found between a therapist and client).

It doesn’t matter how old they are, what gender they are, if either individual is married or not. It may or may not be illegal, but it is immoral. The fact that Eddie Long’s accusers are male, young, and indicate a pattern of seduction only makes it all more egregious, but it’s not the core issue.

The core issue is this: there are few areas for greater vulnerability and beauty than an individual’s sexuality. When this area is encountered in any way that is forcible, or with less than relatively equal power relations, it’s abuse.

What would actually make this situation better?

It’s hard to say. I’ve worked with pioneers like Marie Fortune, Tamar’s Voice and The Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute who have been speaking out against clergy sexual misconduct for years. From my knowledge of these people and their work and my own experiences, I can name at least two things.

Accountability. I was thoroughly impressed with Rev. Carlton Pearson’s compassionate response to Eddie Long. At one point in his interview, he says that he wished the accusers had dealt with their accusations differently. He wishes they had not taken a legal route, but had perhaps called a community of apostle elders together to seek guidance. What I hear Pearson saying is that he wishes there were a trusted system of accountability to which both church members and clergy could go to take their challenges and grieves. Me too! Few churches – even those with hierarchical structure, let alone those with a more congregational style – have systems of accountability that a victim can trust. There is no one to whom one can go and believe that one’s charge will not be ignored, covered up, vilified or moved to another district. People often sue because they see it as the only way to get the attention of church leaders. As a clergy person, I understand the need for accountability. We all need someone we can talk to about the things that weigh heavily on our hearts, the things we are supposed to keep in confidence, the challenges and the joys of the journey we have chosen. Their role is not primarily to punish us when we are human and fallible, but to respond to us and encourage us to be all that God calls us to be. Few of us have such individuals in our lives. Even fewer of us have structures of accountability.

Responsibility. If Eddie Long is not guilty, he should fight the charges. He should do so as lovingly as possible, since he clearly knows the accusers and has a pastoral relationship to them. But if he is guilty, he needs to take responsibility. This is not a legal matter, but a relatively simple moral one. Let me give a personal example. I know of a church that was torn apart by clergy sexual misconduct. It was a far more typical case – heterosexual relationship, married pastor, very adult people, the victim was demonized by the wider congregation, most people in positions of authority ignored it and then moved the situation to another location. It was then that I understood how clergy sexual misconduct hurts everyone. It hurts those who are most intimately involved – spouses, pastors, families. But it hurts the entire congregation who felt betrayed and ignored and used. To make matters worse, no one – not even the new pastor – acknowledged what had happened to this church. Many people left the church; many people left Christianity altogether. Extreme responses, yes. But I also know that no one – even the new pastor who made no offense – ever said: “I am so sorry about what has happened to you as a church. I apologize on behalf of all clergy that your trust has been betrayed. I will do all I can to listen to you and be someone worthy of your trust.” Three sentences.

Three sentences would have healed a world of harm.

Because it would have meant that someone had acknowledged what happened.

I hope that this case and its media attention continue to raise awareness about the issues that are at play surrounding the accusation alone.

I hope that in our fervor for progressive theological values, we don’t forget that there are individuals indicating that they have experienced deep pain from a place where they should be spiritually – and physically – safe.

I hope that we take this opportunity to discuss the clergy sexual abuse/ misconduct and how accountability and responsibility really can make a positive difference in our shared journeys of faith.


Monica A. Coleman, Ph.D.

www.MonicaAColeman.com
blogging on depression & faith at www.beautifulmindblog.com
facebook: www.revmonicaonfb.com
survivor strategies: http://monicaacoleman.com/downloads
if you tweet: @monicaacoleman

(Please return emails to macoleman@post.harvard.edu)



I apologize in advance to those who normally follow my blog, Beautiful Mind Blog. I usually focus the blog on the intersection of depression and faith with a new entry at least once a week. Nevertheless, the firestorm around the allegations of sexual misconduct by Atlanta pastor Bishop Eddie Long compel me to break the silence I’ve kept in the last week.

In short, Bishop Eddie Long, leader of the 25,0000 member Atlanta-based church, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, is being sued in civil court by four different young men (in their early twenties) who are (former) members of his church. They accuse him of coercing them into having sexual relations with them when they were around 17 years old.

There are so many issues at work here. Many friends and colleagues have posted amazing blogs and commentaries about some of the issues surrounding what is now being called “The Eddie Long case.” Dr. Yolanda Pierce of Princeton Theological Seminary reminds us that pastors are servants, not kings. She also highlights the poverty of a prosperity theology. Dr. Jonathan Walton of Harvard Divinity School talks about what happens when churches conform to the motifs of wider celebrity culture. Dr. Shayne Lee of Tulane University brings his expertise on megachurches and market forces to bear on the kinds of issues that Long now faces. In light of Long’s history of virulent homophobia and the gender of the accusers, Dr. Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania reminds us that homophobia in black churches must be addressed. Saida Grundy and Atlanta activist Craig Washington indicate that Eddie Long may now be having to bear the consequences of his dangerous rhetoric about homosexuality. Dr. Kathi Martin of Interactive Faith Café says that the time is ripe for Long and others in church communities to choose love and justice over exclusion and condemnation. Years ago, I wrote about Long’s (mis)use of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy in the fifth chapter of my book, Making a Way Out of No Way. Many of us say these things out of a deep love for and years of scholarship on African American religious culture. We also mention these issues while acknowledging, as Ted Haggard does, that we do not know what happened and that Long deserves a fair trial.

These are all poignant responses, and I agree with many of them. It’s difficult not to comment on the challenges – even problematic nature – of black church homophobia, possible hypocrisy, prosperity theology, and the corporate and celebrity culture of churches. I’m adding my voice to the commentary because of what I have not heard addressed.

I have not heard enough people talk about what I see at the heart of this matter:
the possibility of clergy sexual misconduct

With my colleagues, I cannot say whether or not Eddie Long is guilty of the allegations. I can say that the Eddie Long Case has the opportunity to raise all of our consciousnesses about clergy sexual misconduct. When we remember this, the charges against Long are less about homosexuality, the defensiveness of his congregation, the theology he espouses, or the age and gender of the accusers. The case is about the possible abuse of clerical power.

As a clergy person, I well understand the power people often afford to ministers and priests. Most clergy I know are doing their best to live out God’s callings in their local communities and spheres of influence. At some point, we realize that because we address one of the most intimate, fragile and resilient aspects of people lives – their faith – people ascribe great power to us. They listen to what we say. They ask our opinions on all types of matters. They believe we know something holier than the average person. Most clergy I know are frightened by this power, as we try to handle it as responsibly as we can.

As a public theologian and professor of theology, I know that what we think about God matters in the kind of existence we live out. I know that many churched people learn about God almost exclusively at the hands of their pastors and preachers. The average Christian has not read the entire Bible, nor is she aware of the diversity of theological beliefs that have always existed within Christianity. Many Christians understand a questioning of religious matters and religious leaders to be an attack on one’s faith. While I lament that individuals tend to place so much stock in one person, it also calls clergy to a higher level of accountability in their theologies and in their lives.

As someone who has publicly spoken out against sexual violence for the last 14 years, I know that sexual abuse is always about power. The combination of clergy power and authority mean that clergy are in positions where people trust us deeply. When clergy engage in sexual relations – no matter how voluntary – with people with less power than us, it is an abuse of power.

To put it another way: Laity are often in a vulnerable position in relationship to clergy. Lay people come to clergy with their deepest needs, in times of crisis, and/or when they are emotionally insecure. The emotional and spiritual power is not parallel, and thus the person with less power cannot give “meaningful consent” to a sexual relationship. Such sexual contact is a violation of professional ethics (the same kind often found between a therapist and client).

It doesn’t matter how old they are, what gender they are, if either individual is married or not. It may or may not be illegal, but it is immoral. The fact that Eddie Long’s accusers are male, young, and indicate a pattern of seduction only makes it all more egregious, but it’s not the core issue.

The core issue is this: there are few areas for greater vulnerability and beauty than an individual’s sexuality. When this area is encountered in any way that is forcible, or with less than relatively equal power relations, it’s abuse.

What would actually make this situation better?

It’s hard to say. I’ve worked with pioneers like Marie Fortune, Tamar’s Voice and The Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute who have been speaking out against clergy sexual misconduct for years. From my knowledge of these people and their work and my own experiences, I can name at least two things.

Accountability. I was thoroughly impressed with Rev. Carlton Pearson’s compassionate response to Eddie Long. At one point in his interview, he says that he wished the accusers had dealt with their accusations differently. He wishes they had not taken a legal route, but had perhaps called a community of apostle elders together to seek guidance. What I hear Pearson saying is that he wishes there were a trusted system of accountability to which both church members and clergy could go to take their challenges and grieves. Me too! Few churches – even those with hierarchical structure, let alone those with a more congregational style – have systems of accountability that a victim can trust. There is no one to whom one can go and believe that one’s charge will not be ignored, covered up, vilified or moved to another district. People often sue because they see it as the only way to get the attention of church leaders. As a clergy person, I understand the need for accountability. We all need someone we can talk to about the things that weigh heavily on our hearts, the things we are supposed to keep in confidence, the challenges and the joys of the journey we have chosen. Their role is not primarily to punish us when we are human and fallible, but to respond to us and encourage us to be all that God calls us to be. Few of us have such individuals in our lives. Even fewer of us have structures of accountability.

Responsibility. If Eddie Long is not guilty, he should fight the charges. He should do so as lovingly as possible, since he clearly knows the accusers and has a pastoral relationship to them. But if he is guilty, he needs to take responsibility. This is not a legal matter, but a relatively simple moral one. Let me give a personal example. I know of a church that was torn apart by clergy sexual misconduct. It was a far more typical case – heterosexual relationship, married pastor, very adult people, the victim was demonized by the wider congregation, most people in positions of authority ignored it and then moved the situation to another location. It was then that I understood how clergy sexual misconduct hurts everyone. It hurts those who are most intimately involved – spouses, pastors, families. But it hurts the entire congregation who felt betrayed and ignored and used. To make matters worse, no one – not even the new pastor – acknowledged what had happened to this church. Many people left the church; many people left Christianity altogether. Extreme responses, yes. But I also know that no one – even the new pastor who made no offense – ever said: “I am so sorry about what has happened to you as a church. I apologize on behalf of all clergy that your trust has been betrayed. I will do all I can to listen to you and be someone worthy of your trust.” Three sentences.

Three sentences would have healed a world of harm.

Because it would have meant that someone had acknowledged what happened.

I hope that this case and its media attention continue to raise awareness about the issues that are at play surrounding the accusation alone.

I hope that in our fervor for progressive theological values, we don’t forget that there are individuals indicating that they have experienced deep pain from a place where they should be spiritually – and physically – safe.

I hope that we take this opportunity to discuss the clergy sexual abuse/ misconduct and how accountability and responsibility really can make a positive difference in our shared journeys of faith.


Monica A. Coleman, Ph.D.

www.MonicaAColeman.com
blogging on depression & faith at www.beautifulmindblog.com
facebook: www.revmonicaonfb.com
survivor strategies: http://monicaacoleman.com/downloads
if you tweet: @monicaacoleman

(Please return emails to macoleman@post.harvard.edu)

Detroit on My Mind - The Changing Face of Detroits' Inner City pt. 5

This video depicts the beginning of white flight (gentrification) back to Detroit. This is the upside but it does not address the displaced population of Blacks. This same scenario is being played out around the country and is an ageless/endless cycle.

It is particularly poignant because I grew up one block over from where the video scenes were shot!
Blessings! Rev. Qiyamah

Detroit on My Mind pt. 4

This brief video highlights a few of the community based organizations working to build capacity among residents of Detroit and their efforts to turn things around and recover hope in the face of the economic devastation.


I have been viewing videos on Detroits "demise" all day and many really depicted a dreary forecast for Detroit. However, having heard Mayor Bing's master plan to demolish 10,000 abandoned houses and replace them with industrial farm land I think it is possible that the efforts of a few Community Based Organizations might be too little and too late.

Nevertheless their efforts did help me to regain perspective in recognizing that all the pictures of the devastation could just as easily be balanced out by the gentrification in areas like the Boston/Edison area. My concern is that with whites rushing back to the inner city to claim the foreclosed mansions and renovating them to their former glory (which is a good thing) what happens to the dislocated individuals (almost exclusively black)? Thus race raises its ugly head in all of this. Ironically the 1967 insurrection (not riot)is so far in the past that it might be easy to forget that so much of this is about race politics. Hopefully we will get it right! Meanwhile, we just have to keep revisiting the life cycle and reincarnating ourselves and returning to do this work until then!
Blessings! Rev. Qiyamah

Detroit on My Mind - pt. 3

Grace Lee Boggs, 94 year old Detroit based activist reflects on socialism and worker

Detroit on My Mind Revisited - pt. 2

Detroit on My Mind - Conversation with James Boggs

I will be posting several reflections on Detroit. Many of them will highlight some of the long time activists and organizers in Detroit.

I dedicate these posts to my father who worked at Ford Motor Company beginning in 1946 until he was forced to retire due to heart problems in the 1970s. To my knowledge he never a missed a day of work and was a loyal worker who if he thought about rebelling and doing something else the faces of his ten children were a constant reminder that he had made some decisions that were irreversible.

To him and all the Black men that toiled first in southern fields and then migrated north to the factories for a better life!
Blessed Be! Rev. Qiyamah

Floating Latern Memorial

Lantern Floating Memorial - Peace Ceremony
One day, perhaps soon, I will travel to Hawaii for the Memorial Day Annual Latern Floating. I recently watched a video of the launching of this years floating laterns. It was magical. Peoples expressions were so profound - so many of the people, men, women, children, young and old people were softly weeping. There was something about the ritual of letting go and releasing ones feelings in these simple but beautiful laterns and placing them in the water and watching them float away with and releasing everything that needed to be released appeared to be very cathartic. The outpouring of love, calmness and peace that was captured. Watching the laterns floating and peoples tears and expressions of healing and hope was so moving and powerful!

Lantern Floating Memorial - Peace Ceremony, Hiroshima. Courtesy of Japan National Tourist Organization
when: Aug 2011 (annual)
where: Motoyasu River
During the Hiroshima Lantern Floating Memorial, thousands of cube-shaped paper lights float along the Motoyasu River to bring peace to the souls of the victims who died in the 1945 atomic bombing. The annual ritual promotes world peace.

Families gather along the banks of the river on the evening of the anniversary to launch decorated lanterns with their own personal messages inscribed. As the lanterns float downstream, the water shimmers and reflects the flickering lights, creating an atmosphere of contemplation and tranquillity.


Blessings! Rev. Qiyamah

Training Religious Leaders for a Religiously Diverse World

front to back - Rev. Jay Leach, Dr. Leon Spencer and unidentified participant 2007 Qiyamah's ordination at UU Church of Charlotte in Charlotte, NC


On September 28 I will be attending an interfaith training hosted by Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago titled, Training Religious Leaders for a Religiously Diverse World. I am eagerly anticipating this all day event and will report out on my blog about the event and my experiences. Meanwhile, I have a brief explanation on Interfaith Dialogue that I came found on DuPaul University's website titled, Four Ways of Interfaith Dialogue that I would like to share:

Dialogue of Life - In which people of different faiths and spiritual traditions strive to live in an open and neighborly spirit - includes socializing and hospitality

Dialogue of Action - In which people of spiritual commitment and faith collaborate with others in building a just society - includes service and working for justice

Dialogue of Religious Experience - In which people steeped in their spiritual traditions share their ways of searching for God or the Absolute - includes prayer, worship, and celebration

Dialogue of Theological Exchange - In which specialists seek to deepen their understanding of other spiritual heritages

Q. In what ways have you crossed borders to experience other faith traditions beyond your own? How can you deepen your understanding and appreciation for other spiritual heritages and collaborate to build a just society?

Blessed Be! Rev. Qiyamah

Rosa Parks

Danielle L. McGuire, author of a newly released book on Rosa Parks, deceased civil rights activist, examines Parks life in light of newly discovered information. See below some excerpts from the book titled: At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance

THE BOOK
Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement.

The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written.

In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that ultimately changed the world.

The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began; how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement; and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow era when white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began during World War II and went through to the Black Power movement. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not the birth, of that struggle.

At the Dark End of the Street describes the decades of degradation black women on the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to cook and clean for their white bosses. It reveals how Rosa Parks, by 1955 one of the most radical activists in Alabama, had had enough. “There had to be a stopping place,” she said, “and this seemed to be the place for me to stop being pushed around.” Parks refused to move from her seat on the bus, was arrested, and, with fierce activist Jo Ann Robinson, organized a one-day bus boycott.

The protest, intended to last twenty-four hours, became a yearlong struggle for dignity and justice. It broke the back of the Montgomery city bus lines and bankrupted the company.

We see how and why Rosa Parks, instead of becoming a leader of the movement she helped to start, was turned into a symbol of virtuous black womanhood, sainted and celebrated for her quiet dignity, prim demeanor, and middle-class propriety—her radicalism all but erased. And we see as well how thousands of black women whose courage and fortitude helped to transform America were reduced to the footnotes of history.

A controversial, moving, and courageous book; narrative history at its best.
------------------------
Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

McGuire's "new history" shines fresh light upon the germinal role of black women in the birth and development of the civil rights movement. "For decades," she writes, "the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Parks's spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men." McGuire, assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, goes behind that story to tell of black women's struggles against abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. She foregrounds black women's experiences of "verbal, physical, and sexual abuse" as prime movers of the grassroots movement. From the rape of Recy Taylor (1944) to the rape of Joan Little (1975), McGuire restores to memory the courageous black women who dared seek legal remedy, when black women and their families faced particular hazards for doing so. McGuire brings the reader through a dark time via a painful but somehow gratifying passage in this compelling, carefully documented work. (Sept.)

"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 this terrifying, illuminating book." – Kevin Boyle, National Book Award-winner for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age

"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." –Timothy B. Tyson, National Book Award Finalist for Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

"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." –Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Carry Me Home: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

"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."
--Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People

"A young scholar unearths some hidden history about women in the civil rights movement—then finds it unexpectedly echoed in her own life." Download the complete PDF article.
--Bliss Broyard, ELLE Magazine
=====================================

Excerpt
Prologue – At the Dark End of the Street

On September 3, 1944, the Rock Hill Holiness Church, in Abbeville, Alabama, rocked late into the night. It was nearly midnight when the doors of the wooden, one-story church swung open releasing streams of worshippers, all African American, into the moonlight. After a night of singing and praying, Recy Taylor, Fannie Daniel and Daniel’s eighteen-year-old son, West, stepped out of the country chapel and strolled toward home alongside the peanut plantations that bounded the Abbeville-Headland highway. Taylor, a slender, copper-colored and beautiful twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, noticed a rattletrap green Chevrolet pass them at least three times, young white men gawking from its windows.
“You reckon what they are up to?” Taylor asked.

Taylor and Daniel, a stout sixty-one year old woman, watched the car creep by one last time and roll to a stop a few feet ahead of them. Seven men, armed with knives and guns, got out of the car and walked toward the women.

Herbert Lovett, the oldest of the crew at twenty-four and a private in the United States Army, shouted, “Halt!”

When they ignored the order, Lovett leveled his shotgun. West tugged at his mother’s sleeve, begging her to stop. “They might shoot you,” he whispered.
As the circle of men closed in, Lovett waved his gun at Taylor.

“We’re looking for this girl, right there. She’s the one that cut that white boy in Clopton this evening,” Lovett said, adding that local Sheriff George H. Gamble had dispatched the group to find the alleged assailant.

“You’re wrong,” Fannie insisted, “she’s been to my house all day.”

The men crowded closer, nodding their heads in agreement. “Ain’t this her?” Lovett asked.

“Yep, this the one,” Joe Culpepper said, “I know her by the clothes she got on.”
“That’s her,” Luther Lee agreed. “Get her!”

Lovett lurched toward Taylor and grabbed her arm. Then he turned to West and asked if Taylor was his wife.

“No,” West replied, “she’s Willie Guy Taylor’s wife.” Undeterred, Lovett extended his hand to the teenager, ordered him to shake it, and promised not to hurt Taylor.

“We’re going to take her up here and see if Mr. Gamble knows her,” Lovett claimed. “If she’s not the one, we’ll bring her right back.”

As Lovett spoke, Taylor managed to wrest her arm from his grasp and bolted toward a stand of trees behind a cabin.1

“Come back! Come back!” Fannie yelled. “They going to shoot you. Come back!”2

“Stop,” Lovett shouted. He cocked the gun at the back of her head. “I’ll kill you if you run.”

Lovett walked Taylor to the car and shoved her into the back seat. Three men piled in behind her, while four others squeezed into the front. The headlights switched off and the car crept away. After a few miles, the green sedan turned off the main highway, rattled down a red-clay tractor path into the woods and stopped in a grove of pecan trees. “Y’all aren’t carrying me to Mr. Gamble,” Taylor shouted.

The men in the back seat clasped her wrists and ordered her to be quiet. Lovett grabbed his gun and waved Taylor and his companions out of the car.

“Get them rags off,” he barked, pointing the shotgun at her, “or I’ll kill you and leave you down here in the woods.”

Sobbing, Taylor pulled off her clothes.

“Please,” she cried, “let me go home to my husband and my baby.”

Lovett spread an old hunting coat on the ground, told his friends to strip down to their socks and undershirts, and ordered Taylor to lie down. Lovett passed his rifle to a friend and took off his pants. Hovering over the young mother, he snarled, “Act just like you do with your husband or I’ll cut your damn throat.”

Lovett was the first of six men to rape Taylor that night. When they finished, someone helped her get dressed, tied a handkerchief over her eyes, and shoved her back into the car. Back on the highway, the men stopped and ordered Taylor out of the car. “Don’t move until we get away from here,” one of them yelled. Taylor heard the car disappear into the night. She pulled off the blindfold, got her bearings, and began the long walk home.3

A few days later, a telephone rang at the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama. E. D. Nixon, the local president, promised to send his best investigator to Abbeville. That investigator would launch a movement that would ultimately change the world.
Her name was Rosa Parks.4

In later years, historians would paint Parks as a sweet and reticent old woman, whose tired feet caused her to defy Jim Crow on Montgomery’s city buses. Her solitary and spontaneous act, the story goes, sparked the 1955 bus boycott and gave birth to the civil rights movement. But Rosa Parks was a militant race woman, a sharp detective, and an anti-rape activist long before she became the patron saint of the bus boycott. After meeting with Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks helped form the Committee for Equal Justice. With support from local people, she helped organize what the Chicago Defender called the “strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade.” Eleven years later, this group of homegrown leaders would become better known as the Montgomery Improvement Association. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights movement, was in many ways, the last act of a decades-long struggle to protect black women, like Taylor, from sexualized violence and rape.

The kidnapping and rape of Recy Taylor was not unusual in the segregated South.

The sexual exploitation of black women by white men had its roots in slavery, but continued, often unpunished, through the better part of the twentieth century. As Reconstruction collapsed and Jim Crow arose, white men abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity. White men lured black women and girls away from home with promises of steady work and better wages; attacked them on the job; abducted them at gun-point while traveling to or from home, work or church; raped them as a form of retribution or to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy; sexually humiliated and assaulted them on streetcars and buses, in taxi cabs and trains, and other public spaces.

Black women did not keep their stories secret.

African American women reclaimed their bodies and their humanity by testifying about their assaults… Their testimonies spilled out in letters to the Justice Department and appeared on the front pages of the nation’s leading black newspapers. Black women regularly denounced their sexual misuse. By deploying their voices as weapons in the wars against white supremacy, whether in the church, the courtroom, or in congressional hearings, African American women loudly resisted what Martin Luther King Jr., called the “thingification” of their humanity. Decades before radical feminists in the Women’s Movement urged rape survivors to “speak out,” African American women’s public protests galvanized local, national and even international outrage and sparked larger campaigns for racial justice and human dignity. When Recy Taylor spoke out against her assailants and Rosa Parks and her allies in Montgomery mobilized in defense of her womanhood in 1944, they joined this tradition of testimony and protest.

Montgomery, Alabama was not the only place in which attacks on black women fueled protests against white supremacy. Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia, Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and many other places—had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood.

Like the kidnapping and rape of Recy Taylor in Abbeville, Alabama in 1944, these brutal attacks almost always began at the dark end of the street. But African Americans would never let them stay there.
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NOTES TO PROLOGUE EXCERPT
• 1 “Report” and “Supplemental Report,” submitted by N.W. Kimbrough and J.V. Kitchens, December 14 and 27, 1944, folder 1, CS. See also Earl Conrad, Eugene Gordon, and Henrietta Buckmaster, “Equal Justice Under Law,” pamphlet prepared by the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, n.d., in folder 3, ibid. The Rockhill Holiness church is still there, but is now called the Church of God in Christ. Thanks to Robert Corbitt and Josephine Baker for a tour of the church.
• 2 I-Corbitt 3. I-Corbitt &RTC. Corbitt, Recy’s youngest brother who was a witness to the events that followed the attack, corroborated nearly every detail in the Governor’s report.
• 3 “Report”, 7. According to reports, seven men were in the car, but only six participated in the gang rape. Billy Howerton claims he did not have sex with her. The other assailants corroborated Howerton’s testimony. See “Report,” 9-10.
• 4 I-RCT, I-Corbitt 8.