Happy 100th Birthday, Recy Taylor!

Recy Taylor and Robert Corbitt

Happy 100th Birthday, Recy Taylor!

Recy Taylor was born on New Year’s Eve in 1919, a crucible of violence & resistance. It was the year of the “Red Summer” when white terrorists rampaged through black towns and across the country in an orgy of violence.  WEB DuBois said “We return from fighting. We return fighting.” She was born to fight.

She grew up in Abbeville, in Southeast Alabama during Jim Crow. She was the eldest in a large and loving family that farmed and sharecropped. Her mother died when she was very young. She promised her mother she would raise her siblings. Her baby brother Robert came to see Recy as his mother

Abbeville was also home base for Rosa Parks’s father’s family. She lived there for a time as a young girl and came back to help defend Recy Taylor. It was the fall of 1944. Recy Taylor was walking home from a church revival when a carload of white boys with guns & knives kidnapped her off the street, blindfolded her and drove her to a pecan grove outside of town. They raped her repeatedly for more than 3 hours.

Her companions alerted the sheriff and her family, who desperately searched for her. Taylor’s father Benny Corbitt walked Abbeville’s streets until his shirt was wet with sweat. He spotted Recy stumbling toward home and helped carry her back. Her assailants made her promise not to tell

But once safe, she told her father, husband & the local sheriff the details of the brutal assault. She identified the assailant’s car & the teens who attacked her. A few days later, the Montgomery NAACP heard about what happened. They promised to send their best investigator.

That investigator’s name? Rosa Parks. It was 11 years before she would become famous for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. But she was already a seasoned activist, having cut her political teeth on the Scottsboro case in the early 1930s.

Rosa Parks arrived in Abbeville a couple days later with a notebook & a pen. She took Taylor’s testimony & carried it back to Montgomery where she & the city’s most militant activists organized the “Committee For Equal Justice or Mrs. Recy Taylor.” It was part of a WWII-era surge of Black activism

The “Committee for Equal Justice” grew..spreading from Alabama’s backroads to union halls in Chicago, hotels in Harlem and civil rights organizations from California to North Carolina. They sent petitions and postcards demanding justice for #RecyTaylor and defending her womanhood.

Their petitions piled up on the desk of Alabama Gov. Chauncey Sparks, who worried that Taylor’s case would quickly become “another Scottsboro.” The Henry County grand jury had refused to indict her assailants, so he ordered a private investigation to quiet the protests.

Sparks sent two investigators to Abbeville to ask questions. Their final report, which I found 10 years ago buried in the archives, contained admissions of guilt by the assailants and evidence that Taylor not only told the truth, but that the sheriff lied to protect the rapists.

The governor ordered a second grand jury hearing in the winter of 1945, but the all-white, all-male Henry County jurors refused to indict the rapists. They just weren’t willing to believe that a black woman could be raped and that she deserved equal protection under the law.

This was part of a long legacy. From slavery through the bulk of the 20th century, white men assaulted black women and girls with total impunity. They kidnapped them off the streets, assaulted them at work (especially domestics), and attacked them on trains, taxis, and buses.

White supremacy and patriarchy dictated that black women’s bodies did not belong to themselves, they belonged to everyone. What happened to #RecyTaylor was the rule, not the exception.

What was exceptional was Taylor’s willingness to fight back; to speak out & say “I Am Somebody.” Her refusal to be silent came decades before the women’s movement and the effort to “take back the night” & “speak out” against rape. Taylor refused to be ashamed or silenced.

When I asked her why she spoke out, given the danger and threats, she said, “I didn’t deserve what they did to me.” It was a simple, yet bold stand for her own personhood and human dignity. It’s a truth that resonates today with the #MeToo movement.

Recy Taylor never got justice in the Alabama courts. The Henry County grand jury could not see her humanity; could not agree that she deserved basic bodily integrity and justice. They denied her the right to move through the world unmolested. The activists moved on and so did she

She & her husband raised their daughter, Joyce Lee. For a time they lived in Montgomery with the help of Rosa Parks & the local NAACP. But they missed the closeness & safety of family & went back to Abbeville. Eventually she moved to Florida to pick oranges–not an easy life.

Her daughter died in a tragic car accident. She and her husband separated. In many ways, her life was full of tragedy and disappointment. She persevered. Her survival was, in many ways, a miracle.

I met Recy Taylor in 2008 after I had written a PhD dissertation about racialized sexual violence during the Jim Crow era. I came across her story in a pamphlet put together by the Civil Rights Congress in the 1950s. There was one sentence that mentioned her 1944 case. 1 sentence

It was a thread and I pulled it. It took me first to Alabama to Governor Sparks’ papers, then to upstate New York to Earl Conrad’s papers, then to archives up and down the east coast and the midwest. After many years I stitched the story together.

Perhaps the biggest discovery was that Rosa Parks investigated Recy Taylor’s case. I found evidence of that in the Alabama archives, but nowhere else. I didn’t get confirmation until I met Recy in 2008 and she told me Parks came to visit her in 1944.

Rosa Parks was not the “chief rape investigator” for the Montgomery NAACP, as some have claimed. But she was an investigator. As secretary, she traveled the backroads of Alabama gathering stories, taking notes, & crafting the branch’s response.

And she was interested in rape cases. She & her husband Raymond were part of #Alabama‘s underground activist network that worked to defend the Scottsboro boys from white women’s false charges of rape. And she knew all about white men’s lust for black women.

Rosa Parks was the go-to person in and around Montgomery in the 1940s. She investigated all kinds of cases of racial and sexual terror. It’s a historical travesty that much of the Montgomery NAACP notes from those years are missing.

After the Henry County Grand Jury refused to indict Recy Taylor’s assailants, the Committee for Equal Justice turned its attention to other cases where white men assaulted and raped black women and girls. The fight didn’t end. Taylor’s testimony inspired then as it does now.

I wrote about meeting Mrs. Taylor and her family and how it changed my life in an article for the Detroit Free Press. https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2017/12/10/black-history-jim-crow/933347001/

I met Taylor in January 2009, the same day that millions of Americans witnessed the inauguration of Barack Obama. We watched it together & I asked her if she ever thought a Black woman would be the First Lady? She said that during Jim Crow Black women weren’t even considered “ladies.”

That is part of the reason why so many could be assaulted & attacked with impunity. Black women & girls were denied respect & dignity that was afforded white women & girls. That denial fueled assaults.

Meeting Mrs. Taylor in 2009 was a highlight of my life. She and her whole family embraced me, accepted me and allowed me to help tell their story. I am forever indebted to them for trusting me. I learned so much from Recy Taylor about courage and self-confidence.

My book, At the Dark End of the Street was published by Knopf in 2010. The first three chapters and the epilogue detail Recy’s story and the major civil rights campaign to bring her justice. Hers was the largest campaign for equal justice since the Scottsboro struggle and it helped fuel the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

In 2011, we honored Recy Taylor at the National Press Club in D.C. It was standing-room only & Recy got up & spoke her truth. She was still strong, still courageous and still willing to demand justice. We toured the White House, too. I wish she could’ve met First Lady, Michelle Obama that day.

And in 2011, after an organic online petition drive, the state of Alabama issued a formal apology for the state’s “abhorrent and repugnant failure to properly investigate” Recy Taylor’s 1944 rape case. It wasn’t justice. But even the state of Alabama had to finally #SayHerName.

Recy Taylor was a heroine. Her resistance to rape helped spark the civil rights movement and her testimony against her assailants helped lay the foundation for the women’s movement. Today we can say #MeToo largely because women like Recy Taylor said it decades earlier.

At Taylor’s funeral two years ago, her family received a proclamation from @repjohnlewis extolling her resistance & testimony. Respect from one freedom fighter to another.

Her eulogy emphasized that she was a promise keeper who was devoted to her family and to God. She was a woman who stood up for justice, loved to laugh and liked to wear nice hats. She endured horrors and survived to tell her story. She was the matriarch of her family and has a number of nieces, nephews, grandchildren & great grandchildren who love her dearly and carry on her legacy.

The day after Recy Taylor’s homegoing, Oprah Winfrey told her story to millions of people at the 2018 Golden Globes. It was an incredible moment. Winfrey’s speech honoring Taylor and the women behind the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements bookended a weekend of remembrance and appreciation for Taylor’s life, love, and her lasting legacy.

Not long after that, the Congressional Black Caucus decided to honor Recy Taylor at the 2018 State of the Union. Dressed in black to signify the #TimesUp movement, members wore red Recy buttons. Taylor’s niece, granddaughter and great-granddaughter were there to accept the honor on Recy Taylor’s behalf. I was thrilled to be there, too, as a guest of Representative Brenda Lawrence.

I remain heartbroken that the world lost such a powerful and courageous woman in Recy Taylor. However, her story, her bravery and her demand for dignity & bodily integrity lives on anytime someone refuses to remain silent and speaks out against injustice and abuse.

The Congressional Black Caucus commissioned “Recy” pins to honor her at the SOTU