Recy Taylor

Recy Taylor (born December 31, 1919 , died December 28, 2017 ) was an African American from Abbeville in Henry County , Alabama , USA. On September 3, 1944, she was kidnapped and raped by six white men . Although the men admitted the rape, two refused Grand juries in a row, the men to accuse .

Taylor's rape and subsequent court cases led to the first nationwide protests by the African American community and are considered one of the triggers of the civil rights movement .

Early years

Recy Taylor was born in the Alabama countryside on December 31, 1919. Her parents were farm workers as sharecroppers . Her mother died when Taylor was 17 and she cared for her six siblings. She continued to work in share cropping. In 1944, at the time of the act, she was married to Willie Guy Taylor and had a daughter, Joyce Lee.

Sequence of events

Recy Taylor was walking home with her friend Fannie Daniel and her son West on September 3, 1944 after attending church when a car stopped at the side of the road. In the car were Herbert Lovett and six other men, all armed. Lovett accused Taylor of " stabbing the white boy in Clopton ". The accusation was false as Taylor had been with Daniel all day. The seven men forced Taylor into the car at gunpoint and drove her to some trees by the side of the road. Taylor asked to be able to return to her husband and child. The attackers ignored her request. Taylor was raped by six men, including Lovett.

Reactions

Daniel immediately reported Taylor's abduction to the police. Daniel recognized the owner of the car, Hugo Wilson, who admitted driving Taylor to the rape site. He identified the perpetrators as Dillard York, Billy Howerton, Herbert Lovett, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper, and Robert Gamble. Although three eyewitnesses identified Wilson as the driver of the car, police never questioned Wilson or the other men about the rape. The black community was outraged by the police inaction and notified the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Montgomery . The NAACP dispatched activist Rosa Parks to investigate the case.

First negotiation

Parks founded the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor with the support of trade unions, African American organizations and various women's groups . The group recruited supporters across the country. In the spring of 1945 they had organized "the most influential campaign for equal justice in ten years", according to the Chicago Defender.

The trial took place on October 3rd and 4th, 1944, with an exclusively white and male jury. However, none of the rapists had been arrested, so the only witnesses were Taylor's black friends and family. Taylor's family could not reveal the names of the rapists, and since Sheriff Gamble had not made a comparison , Taylor could not identify their attackers in court. In addition, Wilson and his accomplices were only put on bail after Taylor's hearing. After only five minutes of deliberation, the jury dismissed the complaint. Only an indictment by the grand jury would allow the case to be reopened.

Violent intimidation

In the months after the first trial Taylor received several death threats and her house was of white supremacists with a firebomb attack. Taylor moved with husband and child to their parents, where their father and siblings could protect them. Her entire family was afraid of leaving the house after dark, and Taylor never left the house even during the day. She was not only afraid of the angry vigilante groups , but also of the threats from her rapists. Her father Benny Corbitt kept armed guard in a tree every night. Taylor and her family assumed they would live in fear for the rest of their lives. However, the brutal rape and mendacious negotiation attracted attention from NAACP organizations across the South and the black community. These and numerous other organizations defended Taylor and demanded that their rapists be punished.

Activism for justice

The activists gathered in the Negro Masonic Hall, a building owned by the Prince Hall Freemasons . Members of the Montgomery and Birmingham NAACP, editors and journalists from the Alabama Tribune and Birmingham World , members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and many others coordinated their efforts to bring justice for Recy Taylor. Their experiences spread to Harlem . A report in the Pittsburgh Courier attracted national attention. This led to a publication in the New York Daily News entitled "Alabama Authorities Ignore White Gang's Rape of Negro Mother". The article denounced racial segregation.

According to further media reports, the rape was common knowledge and black activists turned to then-Governor of Alabama, Chauncey Sparks . He reluctantly agreed to an investigation. The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor (CEJRT) soon received national support with numerous local groups across the country. The group had some illustrious members including: WEB Du Bois ; Mary Church Terrell , a suffragette and founder of the National Association of Colored Women ; Charlotte Hawkins Brown , a noted educator; Ira De A. Reid, sociologist and vice director of the Southern Regional Council ; John Sengstacke , the editor of the Chicago Defender ; Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance ; Lillian Smith , the author of the controversial cross-cultural love story Strange Fruit ; and Broadway - Impresario Oscar Hammerstein II . "The" illustrious "group attracted the attention of the FBI when the Un-American Activities Committee claimed the group was merely a cover organization for the Communist Party .

Investigation and second hearing

As part of Spark's investigation, Sheriff Gamble was asked again about what steps he had taken to obtain justice for Recy Taylor. Gamble falsely claimed that he began investigating immediately after the attack. He also claimed that he arrested all of the men involved in the crime two days after the attack and that he put Hugo Wilson on bail of $ 500. He also accused Taylor of being a prostitute and that she had been receiving treatment for sexually transmitted diseases for some time. Other white men from Abbeville, however, confirmed Taylor's good repute.

When questioned, four of the seven men admitted to having had sexual intercourse with Taylor; but they claimed that she was basically a prostitute and that she participated voluntarily. Herbert Lovett and two other men, however, denied knowing anything about the rape. Joe Culpepper, however, one of the perpetrators, admitted that he and the other rapists had been looking for a woman that night, that Lovett got out of the car armed and spoke to Taylor, that Taylor was forced into the car and was later forced leaving the car that she had to undress and was raped. Culpepper's statement was consistent with Taylor's original statement. The Attorney General presented this information and the statements of the accused to the Henry County Jury on February 14, 1945. However, he did not succeed in convincing the jury, again consisting entirely of white men, that there was enough evidence to support an indictment.

aftermath

The black community reacted in shock to the second rejection of Taylor's case. Because of the allegation that Taylor was a prostitute, media coverage of the second hearing was rather hostile to Taylor.

Taylor lived in Abbeville with her family for another twenty years. She said she lived in fear and that many whites treated her badly even after her attackers moved away. She later moved to Florida.

In 2011, the Alabama House of Representatives , Abbeville Mayor and Probate Judge JoAnn Smith apologized to Recy Taylor for the treatment she had received.

Taylor received the apology on Mother's Day in 2011 when she attended Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville. "I felt good," she said. “That was a good day to apologize. I didn't expect that. "

Also in 2011, Taylor visited the White House and participated in a forum on Rosa Parks at the National Press Club .

In 2017, Nancy Buirski's documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor was released , which was shown at the New York Film Festival .

death

Taylor died in a sleep in an Abbeville, Alabama retirement home on December 28, 2017, just three days before her 98th birthday.

Web links

Wikiquote: Recy Taylor  - Quotes

• Treading the tightrope of Jim Crow; Montgomery NAACP. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Danielle L. McGuire: 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 (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 279
2. ↑ Danielle L. McGuire: 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 . Random House, 2010, ISBN 978-0-307-26906-5 , pp. Xv-xvii.
3. ^ McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , 39.
4. ^ Sewell Chan: Recy Taylor, Who Fought for Justice After a 1944 Rape, Dies at 97 (en) . In: New York Times , December 29, 2017. 
5. ↑ ^{a b} McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , pp. Xvi.
6. ^ McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , pp. 6-7.
7. ^ McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , pp. Xvii.
8. ^ " Southern black women find justice elusive for civil rights-era rapes ," Associated Press, October 15, 2010.
9. ↑ ^{a b c} McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , p. 13.
10. ^ ^{A b c} McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , p. 14.
11. ^ McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , p. 15.
12. ^ ^{A b} McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , p. 17.
13. ^ McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , pp. 119-125.
14. ^ ^{A b} Danielle McGuire: 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. . Vintage, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-307-38924-4 , p. 31.
15. ↑ ^{a b} McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , p. 33.
16. ^ McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street , p. 34.
17. ↑ ^{a b} McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, p. 35.
18. ↑ ^{a b} " 'Morally repugnant': Alabama issues apology for its treatment of black woman gang raped by six white men in 1944 ," The Daily Mail , March 30, 2011th
19. ^ ^{A b} " Civil rights-era rape victim revels in White House tour ," The Grio, NBC News, May 13, 2011.
20. ↑ Danielle Wright, Recy Taylor Visits White House , Associated Press report on BET, May 13, 2011.
21. ^ Richard Brody: "The Rape of Recy Taylor" . In: The NewYorker , October 3, 2017. 
22. ↑ Racy Taylor this at 97 . In: Fox News , December 28, 2017.