Recy Taylor
Still no justice for civil rights-era rapes
by Errin Haines
ATLANTA -- Years before Rosa Parks fought for justice from her seat on a Montgomery bus, she fought for Recy Taylor.
Parks was an NAACP activist crisscrossing Alabama in 1944 when she came across the case of Taylor, a 24-year-old wife and mother who was brutally gang raped and dumped on the side of a rural road. Taylor survived only to watch two all-white, all-male grand juries decline to indict the six white men who admitted to authorities that they assaulted her.
Taylor was one of many black women attacked by white men during an era in which sexual assault was used to informally enforce Jim Crow segregation. Their pain galvanized an anti-rape crusade that ultimately took a back seat to the push to dismantle officially sanctioned separation of the races, and slowly faded from the headlines.
Many of these rape victims never got justice and the desire for closure is still there, more than 60 years later - leaving some to wonder what, if anything, can be done to address the wrongs done to them.
"I didn't get nothing, ain't nothing been done about it," Taylor, now 90, told The Associated Press in a phone interview from her central Florida home. The AP is revealing Taylor's identity because she has publicly identified herself as a victim of sexual assault.
"I was an honest person and living right," Taylor said. "They shouldn't have did that. I never give them no reason to do it."
For 20 years after she was raped, Taylor and her family lived in the same Abbeville, Ala., community as the families of her attackers. She spent many years living in fear, and says local whites continued to treat her badly, even after her assailants left town.
Evelyn Lowery, an activist whose husband, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, worked with Martin Luther King Jr., suggested that an apology from the government could be a start to the healing.
"I certainly think it would be in order," Evelyn Lowery said. "For many years, they tried to say that women were the cause of this, that (black) women wanted sexual activity. ... It hasn't been true, but the courts used that to justify not taking action on behalf of the women. It was very demoralizing to all of us."
Taylor is not inclined to pursue a civil case. She believes most, if not all, of her attackers are dead. But she does find the idea of an official apology appealing.
"It would mean a whole lot to me," Taylor said. "The people who done this to me ... they can't do no apologizing. Most of them is gone."
Danielle McGuire, a history professor at Wayne State University who has documented the women's advocacy and Taylor's story in a new book, cites numerous instances of black women enduring unwanted sexual encounters from white men in cities in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Arkansas. Adding to the indignity, McGuire said, was the knowledge that black men - many of them innocent - were accused of and severely punished for the same or lesser crimes against white women. In some cases, they paid with their lives.
Read the Full Essay @ AP
by Errin Haines
ATLANTA -- Years before Rosa Parks fought for justice from her seat on a Montgomery bus, she fought for Recy Taylor.
Parks was an NAACP activist crisscrossing Alabama in 1944 when she came across the case of Taylor, a 24-year-old wife and mother who was brutally gang raped and dumped on the side of a rural road. Taylor survived only to watch two all-white, all-male grand juries decline to indict the six white men who admitted to authorities that they assaulted her.
Taylor was one of many black women attacked by white men during an era in which sexual assault was used to informally enforce Jim Crow segregation. Their pain galvanized an anti-rape crusade that ultimately took a back seat to the push to dismantle officially sanctioned separation of the races, and slowly faded from the headlines.
Many of these rape victims never got justice and the desire for closure is still there, more than 60 years later - leaving some to wonder what, if anything, can be done to address the wrongs done to them.
"I didn't get nothing, ain't nothing been done about it," Taylor, now 90, told The Associated Press in a phone interview from her central Florida home. The AP is revealing Taylor's identity because she has publicly identified herself as a victim of sexual assault.
"I was an honest person and living right," Taylor said. "They shouldn't have did that. I never give them no reason to do it."
For 20 years after she was raped, Taylor and her family lived in the same Abbeville, Ala., community as the families of her attackers. She spent many years living in fear, and says local whites continued to treat her badly, even after her assailants left town.
Evelyn Lowery, an activist whose husband, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, worked with Martin Luther King Jr., suggested that an apology from the government could be a start to the healing.
"I certainly think it would be in order," Evelyn Lowery said. "For many years, they tried to say that women were the cause of this, that (black) women wanted sexual activity. ... It hasn't been true, but the courts used that to justify not taking action on behalf of the women. It was very demoralizing to all of us."
Taylor is not inclined to pursue a civil case. She believes most, if not all, of her attackers are dead. But she does find the idea of an official apology appealing.
"It would mean a whole lot to me," Taylor said. "The people who done this to me ... they can't do no apologizing. Most of them is gone."
Danielle McGuire, a history professor at Wayne State University who has documented the women's advocacy and Taylor's story in a new book, cites numerous instances of black women enduring unwanted sexual encounters from white men in cities in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Arkansas. Adding to the indignity, McGuire said, was the knowledge that black men - many of them innocent - were accused of and severely punished for the same or lesser crimes against white women. In some cases, they paid with their lives.
Read the Full Essay @ AP
