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Civil Rights and Sexual Assault

At the age of eight, Arkansas civil rights leader Daisy Bates discovered that her mother had been sexually assaulted, raped and murdered by three white men. Her father, she recalls, [quote] “told me of the timeworn lust of the white man for the Negro woman…I don’t remember a time when this man I called my father didn’t talk to me almost as if I were an adult. Even so, this was a difficult concept to explain to an eight-year-old girl; but he spoke plainly, in simple words I could understand… ‘Your mother was not the kind to submit…so they took her…They say three white men did it. There was some talk about who they were, but no one knew for sure, and the sheriff’s office did little to find out.’”

For more on this topic see Danielle L. McGuire's book At the Dark End of the Street.