Recy Taylor Fought Off 6 White Rapists--Oprah Winfrey Salutes Her At Golden Globes: #TimesUp

Recy Taylor is a hero. If you don't know her story, you should. This brave woman fought off a group of white men who raped her. She fought back physically and with her voice. She recently died decades after that awful tragedy, with no convictions of any of them. #TimesUp

If you saw Oprah Winfrey’s incredibly moving speech at the Golden Globes, then you know that she shared the spotlight with another woman as she accepted her lifetime achievement award.

Winfrey highlighted Recy Taylor’s shocking and sad story, putting it into the context with the larger national conversation about sexual assault, and connected history’s dots to the new empowerment group Times Up which aims to end sexual violence and harassment.

Of Taylor, Winfrey said, “She lived as we all have lived too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up!!!

“And I just hope—I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on,” Winfrey said.

Taylor has not been a household name or even a particularly well-known figure, but Winfrey’s impassioned mention and a new documentary are bringing attention to the horrible incident of racial injustice and sexual violence that happened the Jim Crow South in 1944.

The documentary, The Rape of Recy Taylor, was released in 2017, just three weeks prior to Taylor’s death at the age of 97 on December 29.

“It is Recy Taylor and rare other black women like her who spoke up first when danger was greatest,” Nancy Buirski, the documentary’s director, told NBC News. “It is these strong women’s voices of the 40s and early 50s and their efforts to take back their bodies that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other movements that followed, notably the one we are witnessing today.”

Taylor was 24, a bride and new mom, when she was abducted and raped by six—some accounts say seven—white men as she walked home from church in Abbeville, AL. Her vicious attackers left her on the side of the road in a desolate, isolated area. Many African-American women who were assaulted in the South in that era kept quiet out of fear, but Taylor spoke up. "I had to tell the truth, of what they done to me."

The NAACP assigned young investigator Rosa Parks—who gained national attention more than a decade later for refusing to give up her seat in the “colored” section of a bus to a white passenger—to look into the case, and she rallied support for justice for Taylor. But, of course…Two all-white, all-male grand juries declined to even indict the men, even though one or more actually admitted to authorities that they assaulted Taylor! #SMH

In a 2010 interview, Taylor told The Associated Press that she figured the men who brutalized her were dead, but she still would like an apology from officials. “It would mean a whole lot to me,” she said. “The people who done this to me...they can’t do no apologizing. Most of them is gone.”

The Alabama Legislature passed a resolution apologizing to Taylor in 2011. It stated that “this deplorable lack of justice remains a source of shame for all Alabamians” and goes on to say “the failure to act was, and is, morally abhorrent and repugnant, and that we do hereby express profound regret for the role played by the government of the State of Alabama in failing to prosecute the crimes.”

Here’s a timeline, courtesy of The New York Times’ Recy Taylor obituary:

• Born on Dec. 31, 1919, to a family of sharecroppers in Abbeville, in southeastern Alabama, Recy Corbitt found herself caring for six younger siblings after their mother died when she was 17.
• On the night of the attack, she had gone to Rock Hill Holiness Church for a Pentecostal service of singing and praying and was walking home along a country highway bounded by peanut farms. A friend, Fannie Daniel, 61, and Ms. Daniel’s 18-year-old son, West, were with her. They noticed a green Chevrolet passing by several times.
• Eventually the car stopped, and seven young white men, armed with guns and knives, stepped out. One of them, Herbert Lovett, the oldest in the group, ordered the three to halt, and then pointed a shotgun at them when they ignored him.
• The men forced Mrs. Taylor into the car at gunpoint and drove her to a grove of pine trees on the side of the road, where they forced her to disrobe. She begged to be allowed to go, citing her husband and their 3-year-old daughter. But Mr. Lovett was unmoved. Ordering her to “act just like you do with your husband or I’ll cut your damn throat,” he and five other men raped her. (A seventh young man, Billy Howerton, said later that he did not take part because he knew Mrs. Taylor.)
• Dumped out of the car, Mrs. Taylor removed her blindfold and stumbled toward safety. Her father, Benny Corbitt, had learned of the abduction and gone searching for her. Soon the county sheriff, George H. Gamble, arrived.
• Mrs. Taylor told Sheriff Gamble that she could not identify her assailants, but her description of the car matched only one vehicle in the county, that of Hugo Wilson. When the sheriff returned with Mr. Wilson and his father, Mrs. Taylor identified Mr. Wilson as one of her attackers, as did the teenage friend.
• Questioned at the county jail, Mr. Wilson acknowledged that he and five others — Mr. Lovett, Dillard York, Luther Lee, Willie Joe Culpepper and Robert Gamble — “all had intercourse with her,” but insisted that they had paid her and that it was not rape. The sheriff sent Mr. Wilson home.
• The next evening, Mrs. Taylor faced new threats: White vigilantes set her porch on fire. The following day, she and her husband, Willie Guy Taylor, and their daughter, Joyce Lee, moved in with her father and siblings. Mr. Corbitt, her father, would sleep in a chinaberry tree in the backyard, watching over the family while cradling a double-barreled shotgun, going inside to sleep only after the sun rose.
• The deputy sheriff, Lewey Corbitt (not a close relation), was not happy about Mrs. Parks’s presence. He drove past the house repeatedly and then forcibly ejected her. “I don’t want any troublemakers here in Abbeville,” he warned her. “If you don’t go, I’ll lock you up.”
• Mindful of the outrage surrounding the case of the Scottsboro Boys — nine black teenagers who had been wrongly accused of raping two white women in 1931 — the county prosecutor took care to provide a semblance of equal justice. But it was an empty gesture.
• When the grand jury met on Oct. 3 and 4, 1944, Mrs. Taylor’s loved ones were the only witnesses. None of the men had been arrested, and there had not been a police lineup, so Mrs. Taylor could not identify her attackers.
• The grand jury declined to indict the men. Word spread through union halls, churches, barbershops, pool halls and, significantly, through the black press. “Alabama Whites Attack Woman; Not Punished,” declared a headline in The Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper.
• It was the final year of World War II, and some blacks likened their struggle for equal rights to the fight against fascism. Eugene Gordon, a black writer for The Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper in New York, interviewed Mrs. Taylor and told his readers, “The raping of Mrs. Recy Taylor was a fascist-like brutal violation of her personal rights as a woman and as a citizen of democracy.”
• At an emergency meeting in the Hotel Theresa in Harlem on Nov. 25, 1944, the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, which Mrs. Parks had helped organize, became a national organization. It spearheaded a campaign of letters, petitions and postcards urging Gov. Chauncey Sparks to investigate.
• The governor, who was a mentor of the segregationist future governor George C. Wallace, came under considerable pressure as African-American activists like W. E. B. DuBois and Mary Church Terrell and writers like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes took up Mrs. Taylor’s cause.
• The governor sent investigators, who found that Sheriff Gamble had lied about having arrested the men. By then, four of the seven men had admitted to having had sex with Mrs. Taylor, but they insisted that she had participated willingly.
• One of the men, Willie Joe Culpepper, however, backed up Mrs. Taylor’s account, saying she had been coerced. “She was crying and asking us to let her go home to her husband and baby,” he said.
• Despite the confession, a second grand jury, on Feb. 14, 1945, refused to hand up an indictment.
• The civil rights activists eventually moved on, and Mrs. Taylor faded into obscurity. Fearing reprisals, she moved to Montgomery for a few months with help from Mrs. Parks. Eventually the family moved to Central Florida, where Mrs. Taylor picked oranges.
• She and Mr. Taylor separated, and he died in the early 1960s. Their only child died in a car crash in 1967. Mrs. Taylor had two subsequent partners, both of whom died. She lived for many years in Winter Haven, Fla., before failing health prompted her relatives to bring her back to Abbeville.
• Taylor passed away peacefully, just shy of her 98th birthday, on December 29, 2017.

From Recy Taylor speaking up in 1944 to today’s #MeToo movement—it just goes to show…this crap has been going on waaaay too long! But #TimesUp … #StayWoke people!!!

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