A new film looks at the 1944 gang rape of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper. Following the rape, she refused to be silenced and spoke up with help from the NAACP’s chief rape investigator Rosa Parks. When Parks went to interview Taylor, the local sheriff kept driving by the house and eventually burst in, threatening Parks with arrest if she didn’t leave town. Parks left and then launched the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, triggering a movement to seek justice 11 years before Parks became a civil rights hero for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, launching the Montgomery bus boycott.
Nancy Buirski talking:
Recy Taylor is amazingly courageous for speaking up. As you mentioned, very few women did that. They were afraid for their lives. Their families would be threatened, and their friends’ livelihoods would be threatened. So, what she did was extraordinary. And, you know, we made this film before this #MeToo movement. We had no idea that this would all erupt. But now, as I look back on it, I realize that Recy Taylor’s story is the first link in a long chain. It may—not even the first link. It really goes back to slavery. But it is a very pivotal link in a chain that goes right through the civil rights movement, right up through Black Power, and obviously is resolved today.
they had a grand jury investigation soon after the rape. I think that took place in October. The rape took place in September. She did not get any justice. You know, she identified her rapists, but, to no one’s surprise, these guys were not indicted. And that’s when Rosa Parks steps in and says, “We have to put more pressure on the governor. We have to get some kind of justice.” So she comes to Abbeville. She interviews Recy Taylor. She gets kicked out of the—Abbeville by the sheriff. She comes back. She interviews her again. And she takes her up to Montgomery, where she forms this Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. And what this—what this does, basically, is it triggers the black newspapers to write about this story. And black newspapers were the only newspapers that were writing these stories in those days. The white newspapers, they didn’t suppress it, they just ignored it. It wasn’t important.
Crystal Feimster talking:
The African-American press, of course, played a huge role in exposing white violence, particularly against African-American women and men throughout the Jim Crow South. Most often those stories were—stories about rape were told through the stories about lynching, right? And that’s what my work has focused on, that sort of longer history. And we can’t think about the press and not think about Frederick Douglass’s newspaper or Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaign and how black folks have mobilized the press. I mean, we can think about, in this current moment, how folks mobilize social media as an outlet, but, yes, African Americans in the black press were key, not just to Recy’s case, but to all the work that black organizations, like the NAACP, were doing in the early 20th century. So, yes.
So, much of what we know about Recy Taylor and her case comes from Danielle McGuire’s research for The Dark End of the Street and also from what Robert Corbitt tells us, what Recy continues to tell us and continues to testify about even today. And we get to hear her voice in Nancy’s beautiful film.
But we know that Recy comes home. We know that she tells her husband, her father what happens to her. She goes before two grand juries—right?—to testify and identify the young boys who gang-raped her that night. As we know, Esther Cooper comes in and does an investigation. There’s a letter-writing campaign, right? There are unions that organize. As we’ve already mentioned, the black press picks up the story. And it’s there that the story moves. It becomes not just a national story, but an international story, right? And the campaign for Recy continues, right?
But, ultimately, after those two grand juries refused to indict on behalf of Recy’s case, as Danielle McGuire’s work reveals, is that the movement moves on, in some ways. And that’s not to say that they’re no longer invested in—investigating rape cases of black women, but the cases keep coming. They keep—there are new cases every day of black women being assaulted by white men. And so they take on new cases, and they try to push those cases forward.
And Recy, you know, goes back to her life and her family and continues to live, but has a hard life. We know that her daughter dies in a tragic car accident. We know that her marriage falls apart. But she continues to live, to live her life, and to speak about—speak out about what happened to her. She never shies away from that story or backs down. And I think she says it eloquently in the film, that she had to speak the truth about what happened to her. And just because there wasn’t justice in the case, she wasn’t silenced. And many women who spoke up after her refused to be silenced. I think there is a long tradition of black women speaking to sexual assault and sexual violence, even when justice isn’t an option.
– a letter from Rosa Parks, where she talks about an attempted rape against her by someone in 1931, much earlier.
Rosa Parks, “I knew that no matter what happened, I would never yield to this white man’s bestiality. I was ready and willing to die. But give any consent, never.”
Nancy Buirski talking:
She is a nanny in a white home. And, of course, this happened frequently to nannies, where, you know, the caretaker—I mean, she was the caretaker. So she is approached by a person in the neighborhood, and she persuades him not to rape her. This is what’s extraordinary. She actually talks him out of it. And that letter reflects her ideology and what she basically says to him.
it’s extraordinary when you think that even she didn’t speak up immediately. This letter is written years after that incident took place. And she used it as an essay, to convey what had happened to her to many more people, and, ideally, empower other people to speak up finally. But that’s an example, to me, of how difficult it was to speak up in those days. One of the reasons that we know so little about this entire, what I consider an epic history is that the few women who spoke up, if they did speak up, it was often not reported. We didn’t find out about it.
You know, when lynching took place in the Deep South, that was meant to be visible. It was a tool of terrorism, and it was meant to tell people where their place was—black—African Americans. But women weren’t treated the same way. They were raped also as a tool of terrorism, but it was also a rite of passage for a lot of these guys. And, I mean, they had been brought up with a mentality that you have a right to do this, you have a right to take advantage of a black woman’s body. And so, not only did the women not speak up, but neither did their husbands, because if their husbands fought back, they’d be lynched.
Crystal Feimster talking:
I was going to say that I also think that, you know, what Rosa Parks’ letter reveals and, I think, what the film reveals and the sort of longer history on sexual violence against black women reveals is that while black women may not have had a public platform in which to speak out and to have an audience, that black women resisted sexual assault. And the way that they spoke out often was in their behavior, in the way that they fought back. And we see that resilience and that outspokenness in Rosa Parks’ words to Mr. Charlie, right?
And I think that that’s where historians find a wealth of sources—right?—around how black women protested, because they didn’t have traditional outlets—the white press, right?—or an audience that was favorable or interested in sexual assault and violence against black women. They had to find alternative ways to fight back and to speak back. And sometimes that was through the way that they resisted the violence. And sometimes it was taking those cases to the local sheriff, and oftentime with little or no result, right?
So, I think there may be a way to kind of think about the sort of spectrum in which—in ways that women do speak out, even though it doesn’t sort of fit how we think women should be speaking out in kind of this #MeToo moment, because I think we all know that these things happen—right?—and that there is a silence, but there is a way that that silence often speaks volumes. So I think it’s important. And I think that both Danielle and Nancy’s work kind of reveals the kind of diverse ways in which women speak out in protest.
Nancy Buirski talking:
We tried to interview many more people who end up in the—than who you see in the film. There were white businessmen that we wanted to speak with, and they shut us out, basically. You see in the film a few relatives of the rapists, who speak to us. And frankly, I was surprised they did. I think that, on some level, they’re in some kind of denial, because they use euphemisms to talk about what their brothers had done. So I’m not sure they quite—either they don’t accept what they did, or they don’t how to talk about it.
But in terms of the African Americans, they were more than happy to speak. And I just want to draw attention to the incredible courage of Robert Corbitt, the brother of Recy Taylor, who has made it his mission to expose this story even today.
– Alabama Legislature in 2011
the Corbitt family, Corbitt and Taylors, they believe that’s a little too little, too late, but they will accept it. I mean, there’s a tremendous amount of dignity in that family. And they will continue speaking of this. They will continue sending this message that this kind of thing should not happen. One of the things that’s really important to know is that no one felt any shame. Recy Taylor felt no shame. There was no reason to. She knew there was a legacy to this kind of behavior.
And she is alive today, Recy Taylor in Alabama.
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Nancy Buirski
director and producer of the documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor.
Crystal Feimster
Yale historian and author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching.
— source democracynow.org