#recy taylor

[morbidology]

On 3 September, 1944, Recy Taylor from Abbeville, Alabama, was abducted while leaving her afternoon church service. She was walking home when a car filled with white men pulled up beside her and dragged her into the car. Inside the car was US Army Private Herbert Lovett and six other men, Hugo Wilson, Dillard York, Billy Howerton, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper and Robert Gamble, all of whom were armed. From here, the ruthless men took her to a secluded area while all seven of them brutally sexually assaulted her in turns.

After eventually letting Recy go, the men were quickly identified by the car that was used to abduct her. The driver, Hugo Wilson, was called in for questioning and readily confessed to what they had done. Nevertheless, none of the other men were ever questioned and Wilson was set free without any charges being brought against him. Unsurprisingly, the African American community were outraged by this clear lack of justice and racial bias and reported the case to the NAACP in Montgomery.

Rosa Parks, an investigator and prevalent activist against sexual assault on minorities, was sent in to build a defence for Recy. Despite the clear evidence against the men and the confession from Wilson, they were prohibited from being identified at trial and the case was thrown out by an all white, all male jury. Afterwards, Recy received a number of death threats from citizens of the town and even from the men who had attacked her.

Keen for justice and for the case to be known, NAACP and Rosa Parks spread the horrific story up the coast to Harlem, New York, and made it into publications such as the New York Daily News and Pittsburgh Courier. With the story spreading, activists wrote to the Governor of Alabama who gradually agreed to launch an investigation. Four out of the seven attackers admitted that they had sexually assaulted Recy, who was a reserved and married woman, but attempted to justify it by calling her a “prostitute” and “willing participant.”

Joe Culpepper confessed that the group had gone out in search of a woman to rape - his story as to what took place corroborated exactly what Recy had said. Despite this, a second all white, all male jury refused to issue any indictments. In 2011, the Alabama House of Representatives apologised to Taylor on behalf of the state “for its failure to prosecute her attackers.

[fdrlibrary]

BLACK WOMEN IN THE WARTIME STRUGGLE

Black women were on the frontlines of civil rights activism during the war years.

The grassroots organizing work of young leaders like Juanita Jackson, Ella Baker and Rosa Parks helped fuel a dramatic increase in NAACP membership and branch activism. Union organizers like Dollie Lowther Robinson and Maida Springer labored to ensure workers’ rights. Black women also engaged in direct-action protests against segregation like Pauli Murray’s 1940 arrest for sitting in the whites-only section of a bus in Virginia.

Grassroots organizers Juanita Jackson, Ella Baker, and Rosa Parks helped the NAACP grow dramatically during the war. - https://www.mdhistory.org/resources/jackson-and-mitchell-family-portrait/ - https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/94504496/ - https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2015647352/

More than half a million Black women left farm and domestic work for better-paying jobs in wartime shipyards and defense factories. But they had to struggle against employers who refused to hire Black women (or confined them to menial jobs) and white employees who resisted working alongside them.

Black women also overcame determined opposition to enter the armed services. Mary McLeod Bethune served as a special assistant in the War Department and worked with the National Council of Negro Women and Eleanor Roosevelt to open the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) to Black recruits. Eventually, 6,500 served. Bethune also lobbied successfully for officer appointments. Still, Black WACs served in segregated units and were often assigned low-skilled work. The Army also limited the number of Black nurses and restricted them to segregated hospitals. Conditions in the Navy were even worse. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox opposed the entry of Black women into the service’s women’s auxiliary (WAVES). They were only admitted after his death in 1944.

Major Charity E. Adams inspects a Women’s Army Corps (WAC) battalion in England, February 15, 1945 (https://catalog.archives.gov/id/531249)

African American women also took on the then taboo subject of sexual violence. Sexual assaults on Black women by white men were a parallel offense to the lynchings of Black men. A 1944 Alabama rape case involving Recy Taylor sparked an NAACP investigation by Rosa Parks and widespread publicity. The Committee for Equal Justice, organized by Parks, led a national protest drive to bring the seven, armed white rapists to justice. Its allies included the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), described by historian Erik McDuffie as “the shock troops for Black equality across the Jim Crow South during the war.” The SNYC conducted wartime campaigns for desegregation and voting and labor rights. Its leadership included women like Rose Mae Catchings and Sallye Bell Davis, mother of activist Angela Davis.

Please visit our current special exhibition BLACK AMERICANS, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND THE ROOSEVELTS, 1932-1962: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/civil-rights-special-exhibit

[kosmik-signals]

“Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, on Sept. 3, 1944, when she was abducted and gang-raped by six white men. The crime, which N.A.A.C.P. activist Rosa Parks investigated and which garnered extensive coverage in the black press, never saw an indictment for the accused.   In the film “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” director Nancy Buirski explores Taylor’s story, Rosa Parks’ work on her behalf, and the history of racial violence, particularly against women, in the postwar South.”

Chosen as one of Time Magazine’s 100 women who defined the last century.

(via Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks, and the Struggle for Racial Justice | National Museum of African American History and Culture)

[peacebeuponu]

The story of Recy Taylor who recently passed away, which was mentioned by Oprah at the 2018 Golden Globe speech.

[dailykos]

[writingsforwinter]

Recy Taylor, Alabama woman raped by six white men, dies

Recy Taylor, an Alabama African-American woman whose abduction and rape by six white men in 1944 made national headlines, died Thursday morning.

Everyone should know this woman's name. Recy Taylor was kidnapped and gang-raped by six white men in 1944 in Alabama. They offered her hush money. She refused. Rosa Parks herself was the lead investigator on the case, who helped form the defense team for Taylor. All this happened 11 years prior to Parks' refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

Despite their confessions, all six rapists were acquitted in a trial featuring an all-white, all-male jury.

67 years late(r), Taylor received an apology from Alabama. She has now passed away. Her case is seen as the #MeToo moment of the Civil Rights Movement.

[fandomforward]

In Oprah's speech at the Golden Globes, she mentioned Recy Taylor, who's life reflects the plight of Black women in the South leading up to the Civil Rights movement (and beyond). Want to learn more about Recy? Stop by the library or your local bookstore and grab a copy 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.

[tara-l-blackmore]

BLM

So...

Erica Garner passed away today.

On the 28th, Recy Taylor passed away.

Neither of them ever saw justice.

Both of them were given condescending pats-on-the-back and ordered to be satisfied with it.

Both were Black women, who were wronged by the country they lived in and loved, and never saw retribution.

There are no words for my grief, though mine is pithy and pointless.

I'm enraged by how they were treated, infuriated by their lack of justice, enraged by their country's patronising response to their suffering.

Recy was wronged in the 1940s.

Erica was wronged in the 2010s.

Almost a century apart, and neither saw peace, growth, actual change.

Please.

Do not forget them.

Do not let them of lived - and died - in vain.

Please.

They mattered. Their lives mattered.

Do not forget.