Recy Taylor

“I was an honest person and living right. They shouldn’t have did that….I didn’t get nothing, ain’t nothing been done about it”.

 

Recy Taylor (1919-2017) is a woman I had never heard of until I stumbled across her while doing research for a different post about Rosa Parks, but her story touched me so much I felt compelled to share hers too. In 1944, Taylor was abducted at gunpoint on her way home from church, and subsequently gang-raped by six white men. Recy’s abduction was immediately reported to police and yet despite eye witnesses able to identify the men (all US army soldiers), no one was arrested in connection with the assault. For speaking up about her ordeal, Taylor and her husband and child were subjected to numerous attacks and threats from white supremacists and were forced to flee back to her family home for protection. Rosa Parks, more famous for her own activism, was assigned to investigate Taylor’s case and brought it to national attention. Two investigations were launched which revealed that the Sherif had lied about arresting the perpetrators, that 4/6 men had confessed to having “consensual” sex with Taylor, but that a fifth man had confessed to her armed abduction and rape. Despite these confessions and revelations, both juries (each comprised solely of white men) cleared the assailants of blame. Worse, they sought to defame Taylor as a whore – based on allegations that she had once received treatment for venereal disease – who had consented to the sex and then lied about it. This slander turned the media and national sentiment against Taylor and reduced the chance of her ever achieving justice. Taylor was, however, offered a $600 “reward” as hush money as an incentive to drop the case. Courageously, she refused, and continued to fight for justice for the rest of her life. Despite no formal prosecutions ever being brought, the case was considered a major victory for the formation of the civil rights movement because of the successful mobilization of activists across the nation: "The Recy Taylor case brought the building blocks of the Montgomery bus boycott together a decade earlier.’

In 2011, the publication of an important book by Danielle L. McGuire's book: ‘At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance…’ forced formal apologies from the Alabama state to Taylor, in which they stated that their failure to persecute her attackers was : ‘morally abhorrent and repugnant’. Taylor graciously accepted the apology, but continued to speak out about her ordeal until her death. She was even invited to the White House in 2011.

Taylor showed truly remarkable bravery in speaking out about her attack in a time when doing so could have cost her her life. Even today, it is extremely hard for victims of rape and sexual assault to speak out against powerful men, even more so for women of colour. This was recognised by Oprah Winfrey in 2018: ‘for too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared speak their truth to the power of those men ... And I just hope — I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth ... goes marching on." To quote from McGuire’s book: ‘Decades before the women's movement, decades before there was anyone saying “me too”,  Recy Taylor testified about her assault to people who could very easily have killed her — who tried to kill her." As much as I am angered by the lack of justice Taylor received, I am inspired and awed by her courage, her self-respect, and her refusal to let powerful white men get away with treating women as property to be abused. The lack of police support for Taylor and her disgraceful treatment at the hands of the judicial powers also seem extremely important to highlight during the current #BLM movement and again highlights the long-entrenched lack of respect and dignity the US “justice system” holds for black lives.