In 2016, former Oklahoma City Police Officer and rapist Daniel Holtzclawwas sentenced to 263 years in prison for the rapes and sexual assaults of seven black women and one black girl, ranging in age from 17 to 58.
He was found guilty of 18 of 36 charges, including four charges of first-degree rape, one of rape by instrumentation, six of sexual battery and four of forcible oral sodomy.
Before his arrest, trial and conviction, and before his name began trending, coverage of the case was minimal at best. If not for the relentless efforts of such organizations as the African American Policy Forum, the Black Women’s Blueprint and OKC Artists for Justice, Holtzclaw’s crimes may have flown under the radar, which is too often the case when black women are victims of heinous crimes.
Though I was thrilled to see Holtzclaw shaking and crying in court like the cowardly predator that he is, and happy for the women who did receive some validation in a court of law that their lives mattered, he should have never felt comfortable enough to prey on them in the first place. But this country teaches men—with power and without—that black women are disposable.
Even with the unexpected verdict, though, I could not stop thinking about the five women who were told that their pain, their suffering, their trauma, meant nothing.
I could not stop thinking about Recy Taylor and Gertrude Perkins.
Recy Taylor was 24 years old on Sept. 3, 1944, when she was abducted, blindfolded and gang-raped by six white supremacists in Abbeville, Ala. She was walking home from church with her friend Fannie Daniel and Daniel’s son, West, when a green Chevrolet that had circled the street several times finally pulled alongside them.
Seven white men forced Taylor into the vehicle at gunpoint; one of them, Billy Howerton, would later say that he didn’t participate in the rape because he knew Taylor, the New York Times reports.
Taylor, who died Dec. 27 at 97 years old, told her story to NPR’s Michel Martin in 2011:
We went on to church and came back. A car running around outside of us, six young men jumped out with a gun and said that—you’re the one that cut a white boy in Clarkton. And the police got us out looking for you. You get in the car and we will take you uptown to the police station.
And they got me in the car and carried me straight through the woods, but before they go where they was going, they blindfolded me. After they messed over and did what they were going to do me, say, we’re going to take you back. We’re going to put you out. But if you tell it, we’re going to kill you.
In a 2011 interview with The Root, Taylor talked about the loud silence smothering her pain.
“Wasn’t nothing done about it,” Taylor, then 91, said. “The sheriff never even said he was sorry it happened. I think more people should know about it … but ain’t nobody [in Abbeville] saying nothing.”
