Recy Taylor, an Alabama native, was raped by a group of seven white men in 1944.

The account served as the backdrop for Wayne State University’s professor Danielle McGuire’s lecture, “At The Dark End of The Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power,” held March 14 in Loosemore Auditorium.

The lecture examined the relevance of sexually abused African-American women testimonies, the core of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

McGuire’s research about sexual violence against black women led to her investigate Taylor’s experience. McGuire found seven boxes of archival material about the Taylor case in the Alabama Department of Archives and History.

“I read a paragraph about Taylor in a 1950s pamphlet called, ‘We Charge Genocide,’” McGuire said. “It was created by an organization called the Civil Rights Commission, and they went to the U.N. and accused the United States of genocide against African-Americans.”

McGuire said the story was so moving and so powerful that she could not ignore it. Taylor had the courage to testify, and McGuire felt like she owed it to Taylor to help find her a wider audience.

Today, Taylor is 91-years-old. Although the Civil Rights Act exists and McGuire’s book has been inspired by Taylor’s testimony, the victim has yet to experience justice herself.

Robert Corbitt, Taylor’s brother, is appreciative for McGuire.

“We thank God for McGuire because she shed light on the investigation,” Corbitt said. “We knew we wouldn’t get anywhere with the investigation, but we wanted to make noise anyway. All we want is an public apology from the city of Abbeyville.”

Megan Morrissey, GVSU student, was able to draw parallels from Taylor’s life.

“The most important thing I learned was the courage it took for her to stand up and get back the power she deserved,” Morrissey said. “In my personal life, it will remind me to stand up for what I believe in.”

During the presentation, McGuire said old slavery laws made African American women property of white men and banned interracial marriage but not the production of children out of wedlock for profit.

“In order to understand the Civil Rights Movement, we must realize that the core of the movement was the protection of black womanhood,” McGuire said. “Rape was a weapon of terror and carried over from the Jim Crow era.”

McGuire covered the decades between 1940 and 1960. She showed accounts of women often overlooked, such as Gertrude Perkins.

In 1949, Perkins was sexually violated by two policemen in Montgomery, Ala. Her case spurred two months of public protest.

Betty Jean Owens, an African-American college student from Tallahassee, Fla., was raped by four white male students in 1959. Unlike many cases of the time, the culprits were sentenced to life in prison.

McGuire showed that Taylor’s courage to testify joined a movement, coupled with the national attention from Rosa Parks, to spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

“Parks was more than a feeble old lady who refused to give up her seat, and the men came in and took over. Rosa Parks was at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement,” McGuire said. “Furthermore, it was the black women who kept working the boycotts, walked to and from work, and filled the church pews.”

The Montgomery, Ala. boycott, which lasted 381 days, protested the racial, sexual and physical abuse that African-American women suffered from white male bus operators. In the end, the boycott led to the 1965 Civil Rights Act, still in existence today.

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