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2025 Prathia Hall Lecture The Radical Roots of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its Lessons for Today with Danielle McGuire Monday, April 21 | 5 pm Theron Room, Wright Library and streaming online
>>RSVP to attend in person or online
The Montgomery Bus Boycott is often reduced to a simple story of Rosa Parks’ defiance, but its true origins lie in a decade-long fight led by Black women against racial and sexual violence. Long before 1955, Rosa Parks and her activist allies organized in response to the systemic abuse of Black women—on buses, in police custody, and throughout Jim Crow Alabama. Their fight was never just about ending segregation or a seat at the front of a bus; it was about dignity, bodily integrity, and the right to move through the world without being assaulted.
Understanding the real history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and not just the simplistic fable, offers enduring lessons about organizing, resistance, and the power of collective action—tools we need now more than ever.
Danielle McGuire, PhD, is an award-winning Civil Rights historian, public speaker and the 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 the editor of Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement; wrote the forward for John Hersey’s Algiers Motel Incident; and has contributed chapters to many other books related to the Black Freedom Struggle. 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 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.
