Award-winning author and historian Dr. Danielle McGuire, whose speciality lies in the Civil Rights movement, confessed that she didn’t like her high school history classes.
“It wasn’t until I was a junior in college that history spoke to me,” said McGuire, who will give a presentation titled “The Past Is Never Dead: Why History Matters Now More than Ever” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 29, at the Eccles Center for the Performing Arts’ Black Box Theater, 1750 Kearns Blvd.
“I was taking a course on the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi, and I went on a class trip to the South where we went to the places we had read about in our textbooks. That made the past come alive in a way that it had never been before for me,” she said.
During that trip, McGuire, who grew up in Wisconsin, got to know the South and its history.
“I think the thing that was most exciting was speaking to Civil Rights veterans, who talked about their experiences,” she said. “We also did archival research at the state archives at Tougaloo College, a historically Black college in Mississippi. And that opened up a whole world of questions and curiosities for me. I realized the past is everywhere. It’s still here. It’s all around us. And a lot of questions about why things are and where we are today can, in many ways, be answered with good history.”
During her presentation, hosted by the Park City Institute in partnership with the anti-domestic violence nonprofit, Peace House, McGuire will discuss sections of her award-winning 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.”
One of the women McGuire wrote about was Recy Taylor, who was 25 and lived in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was kidnapped and raped by a gang of white men in 1944.
“The NAACP in Alabama heard about her attack and sent in their best investigator, who happened to be Rosa Parks,” said McGuire, a Lerner Scott Prize recipient.
This was 11 years before Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, which started the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement, according to McGuire.
“After my book came out in 2010, the Alabama State Legislature unanimously voted to issue Recy an apology in 2011,” she said. “While it wasn’t justice, per se, they had to say her name and admit they were wrong for not investigating her case properly.”
The apology was important to Taylor, because it was a step to restorative justice, McGuire said.
After the apology, Taylor and McGuire were invited to the White House, and in 2017, filmmaker Nancy Buirski released her documentary, “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” which was about Taylor and the role her case played in creating this infrastructure of activism, which Parks eventually found herself the center of, according to McGuire.
“Recy died in late December of 2017, and I went to her funeral,” she said.
The Sunday following the funeral, McGuire turned on the TV and saw that Oprah Winfrey was giving her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award during the 2018 Golden Globe Awards.
“Oprah talked about the #metoo Movement and #timesup and eulogized Recy Taylor,” she said. “A few days later Oprah went to Abbeville and met Recy’s family.”
Speaking of Parks, McGuire plans to take a different angle while talking about the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
“My argument, and this is something I write about in my book, is that the bus boycott is really a women’s movement for bodily integrity,” she said. “Sexual violence is a catalyst for community mobilization, and I will show how a lot of Civil Rights campaigns we think we know — Montgomery, Birmingham/Salma and Freedom Summer — are all rooted in defending Black women from sexual violence. One thing you couldn’t legislate entirely through the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act, is the ability to move through the world without being molested or attacked.”
McGuire will also discuss how the bus boycott, in and of itself, contains many tools that can help make communities better.
“It’s about how ordinary people came together to fundamentally change the community they lived in, and in the process, helped change the world,” she said.
In order to get those tools into people’s hands, history needs to be presented in a “holistic and truthful way,” McGuire said.
“That’s a challenge, because not only do we have people around the country questioning whether history is important, they are trying to control what we teach about the past,” she said. “There are a lot of people who are interested in sanitizing the past to make it seem almost nostalgic, to create a romantic version of the past. But the truth is really more interesting and more useful. And I think we can learn a lot from being really honest about the past, and looking at our country’s history, the good and the bad, with wide-open eyes.”
McGuire believes there’s no reason to hide some of the United States’ historic failures, because everyone can learn from these mistakes.
“I think it’s important that we get comfortable with the uncomfortable parts of our history, and use our knowledge to create a better future for everyone,” she said. “Our schools are filled with people from all kinds of backgrounds. When we limit American history to one type of people, or sanitize it in a way where we leave out anything negative, a lot of people can end up feeling America isn’t their place, or that whatever happened in the past doesn’t matter.”
McGruire said there is legislation pending in more than 44 states to alter, silence or minimize
American history to its most simplistic stories.
“I think a lot of arguments now are that we can’t teach about the ‘bad things’ in history, and it will somehow make kids today feel bad,” she said. “That drives me crazy, particularly because the drive for that is rooted in a lack of knowledge about our history, and the usefulness of teaching a broad, diverse and intersectional past.”
McGuire, who will do a book signing after her presentation, said being a white woman who studies Black history has empowered her to think more deeply about the present, which is something she loves to share during her presentations.
“As a white woman who studies Black history, I like to show that our history has not been something that has hurt me,” she said. “It has broadened my horizons more than I could have expected, so I like to leave people with a feeling of empowerment that they have the tools to change the world around them. I like to leave them with a sense that they, themselves, can be history makers.”