Recy Taylor

Recy Taylor (née Corbitt; December 31, 1919 – December 28, 2017) was an African-American woman from Abbeville in Henry County, Alabama.

She was born and raised in a sharecropping family in the Jim Crow era Southern United States.

Recy Corbitt was born on December 31, 1919, in rural Alabama, where her family were farmworkers doing sharecropping.

At 17, her mother died and she cared for her six siblings.

In the 1940s, Taylor's refusal to remain silent about her rape by white men led to organizing in the African-American community for justice and civil rights.

On September 3, 1944, Taylor was kidnapped while leaving church and gang-raped by six white men.

Despite the men's confessions to authorities, two grand juries subsequently declined to indict the men; no charges were ever brought against her assailants.

She continued to work in sharecropping and by the time she was 24 in 1944, she had married Willie Guy Taylor and they had a young daughter, Joyce Lee.

Recy Taylor was walking home from church on September 3, 1944, with her friend Fannie Daniel and Daniel's teenage son West, when a car pulled up behind them on the road.

In the car were US Army Private Herbert Lovett and six other men, all armed.

Herbert Lovett accused Taylor of cutting Tommy Clarson "that white boy in Clopton this evening."

This accusation was false, as Taylor had been with Daniel all day.

The seven men forced Taylor into the car at gunpoint and proceeded to drive her to a patch of trees on the side of the road.

They forced her to remove her clothes saying "Get them rags off, or I'll kill you and leave you down here in the woods."

After she was forcibly undressed, Taylor begged to return home to her family, including her husband and an infant child.

The assailants ignored her requests, all removed their clothes, and watched as Lovett ordered Taylor to lie down and for her to "act just like you do with your husband or I'll cut your damn throat."

She was raped by six of the men, including Lovett.

Taylor's kidnapping was reported immediately to the police by Daniel.

Daniel identified the car as belonging to Hugo Wilson, who admitted to picking up Taylor and, as he put it, "carrying her to the spot" and pinned the rape on six men, Dillard York, Billy Howerton, Herbert Lovett, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper and Robert Gamble.

Even though three eyewitnesses identified Wilson as the driver of the car, the police did not call in any of the men Wilson named as assailants, and Wilson was fined $250.

The black community of Abbeville was outraged at the actions taken by the police, and the event was reported to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Montgomery, Alabama.

The NAACP sent down their best investigator and activist against sexual assaults on black women, Rosa Parks.

In early October, the Chicago Defender, which had a national African-American audience, ran a front-page article titled "Victim of White Alabama Rapists", which profiled Taylor and the case.

Parks took the case back to Montgomery where she started to form support for Taylor with the assistance of E.D. Nixon, Rufas A. Lewis, and E.G. Jackson, all influential men in the Montgomery community.

Parks and her allies formed the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Taylor, "with support from national labor unions, African-American organizations, and women's groups."

The grand jury hearing took place on October 3–4, 1944, with an all-white, all-male jury.

However, none of the assailants had been arrested, which meant that the only witnesses were Taylor's black friends and family.

Taylor's family could not identify the names of the assailants, and since Sheriff Gamble "never arranged a police line-up, Taylor could not identify her attackers in court".

Also, the $250 bond Gamble placed Wilson and his accomplices under "were issued late in the afternoon, the day after Taylor's hearing".

After five minutes of deliberation, the jury dismissed the case.

The only way it could be re-opened would be through an indictment from a second grand jury.

In the months following the trial, Taylor received multiple death threats, and her home was firebombed.

Taylor, along with her husband and child, moved into the family home, where her father and siblings would help protect Taylor from other death threats.

Her entire family was afraid to go out after dark, and Taylor would not leave even during the day.

She not only feared the threats from the angry vigilantes of the town, but also the threats from her attackers the night of the assault.

The group recruited supporters across the entire country and by the spring of 1945 they had organized what the Chicago Defender called the "strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade."

In 2011, the Alabama Legislature officially apologized on behalf of the state "for its failure to prosecute her attackers."

Taylor's rape, refusal to remain silent, and the subsequent court cases were among the early instances of nationwide protest and activism among the African-American community, and ended up providing an organizational spark in the civil rights movement.

At the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award, Oprah Winfrey discussed and brought awareness to Taylor's story.

The Congressional Black Caucus led Democratic Caucus members in wearing red "Recy" pins while attending the 2018 State of the Union, where Taylor's granddaughter, Mary Joyce Owens, was a guest.