For Recy Taylor, Sympathy Is Not Enough
91-year-old Recy Taylor’s 1944 gang rape by a group of white men when she was just 24 years old inexplicably went overlooked and unpunished by Alabama officials, despite admissions by her attackers.
Colorlines reports that while Abbeville city and Alabama state officials held a press conference yesterday to express their personal sympathy for Taylor and the injustice that the case has come to represent, there’s still been no official apology.
The Roots Cynthia Gordy wrote about the history behind this and Rosa Parks involvement with the case:
Sept. 3, 1944: It's a damp evening in the Alabama black belt, nearly midnight, but services at Rock Hill Holiness Church in the small town of Abbeville have just let out. Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old sharecropper, sets out along the town's fertile peanut plantations, accompanied for the walk home by two other worshippers from the African-American congregation. Moments later, a green Chevrolet rolls by -- and their routine journey takes a horrifying turn.
Wielding knives and guns, seven white men get out of the car, according to Taylor and witnesses from a state investigation of the case. One shoves Taylor in the backseat; the rest squeeze in after her and ride off. Her panicked friends run to tell the sheriff.
After parking in a deserted grove of pecan trees, the men order the young wife and mother out at gunpoint, shouting at her to undress. Six of them rape Taylor that night. Once finished, they drive her back to the road, ordering her out again before roaring off into the darkness.
Days after the brutal attack, Taylor's story traveled through word of mouth, catching the attention of a Montgomery NAACP activist named Rosa Parks. A seasoned anti-rape crusader, who focused on the sexual assaults of black women that were commonplace in the segregated South, Parks would eventually help bring the case international notice. Despite her efforts, however, in Jim Crow-era Alabama, Taylor's assailants were never punished.
Mandy Burns writes:
At the time of the rape, Willie Taylor, the husband of then 24 year-old Recy Taylor, was offered one hundred dollars from each rapist as a proposed settlement if he would just forget that it happened. Since the event sparked the interests of influential individuals such as Rosa Parks and members of the NAACP, these white men were gaining much unanticipated negative attention. Marvin White represented the seven men who openly admitted to raping Recy Taylor, and was quoted as asking Willie Taylor, "N***er- ain't $600 enough for raping your wife?" The month following Taylor's rape, a jury heard her case. Each man was identified, and one of the men actually confessed details. Yet, the grand jury returned no indictments on these men.
Change.org has a petition you can sign:
Demand Alabama Publicly Apologize for Failure to Address Jim Crow-Era Gang Rape
Help Recy Taylor get the apology she deserves and public recognition of the injustice perpetrated by signing this petition to Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, Abbeville Mayor Ryan Blalock, the Abbevile police department, and state and city representatives.
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 Powerby Danielle L. McGuire, documents this story and others in her book
Long before Rosa Parks became famous for resisting Jim Crow laws, she was engaged in advocating for social justice for black women who were the victims of sexual violence at the hands of white men. Historian McGuire aims to rewrite the history of the civil rights movement by highlighting sexual violence in the broader context of racial injustice and the fight for freedom. Parks worked as an investigator for the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama, specializing in cases involving black women who had been sexually assaulted by white men––cases that often went untried and were the political opposite of the allegations of black men raping white women ending in summary lynching with or without trials. McGuire traces the history of several rape cases that triggered vehement resistance by the NAACP and other groups, including the 1975 trial of Joan Little, who killed a white jailer who sexually assaulted her. Despite the long tradition of dismissing charges brought by blacks against whites, several of the cases ended in convictions, as black women asserted their right to be treated justly.
For too many years the rape of women of color goes overlooked in the press, and victorious prosecutions are few and far between.
"It's curious, to say the least, that Taylor's name is not mentioned in history books," Cynthia Gordy criticizes in her article at The Root. "While most analyses of circumstances that inspired the civil rights movement focus on black men -- being lynched or railroaded into jail, or facing down segregationists -- the stories of countless black women like Recy Taylor, who were raped by white men during the same era, have gone understated, if not overlooked entirely." The modern ignorance of a case that launched a major campaign run by an impressive coalition of progressive groups, one that was successful in pressuring the Alabama governor into investigating but was then blocked by city law enforcement, is a sad reflection on our attention to the darkest spots of American history.
Please help demand this apology.