Feb. 14, 1945, White men in Alabama were of the opinion that
Black women were basically all whores to do what they felt like with, or
rather one could believe that as on this day a second all White male grand jury
voted unanimously to not indict six men for the gang rape of Recy Taylor a
Black woman from Abbeville, Alabama.
On the night of Sept. 3 1944 Taylor was walking home from a
revival meeting, with two friends near her own home when 7 men in a green Chevrolet pulled
up to her and forced her into their car, one of the men, Herbert Lovett, had a
shotgun he aimed at her two friends. They took Taylor to a remote wooded area
and six of them raped her.
Her friends had already spread the alarm to her family and the
Negro community so when the men threw Taylor from their car a search party was
already looking for her. Disoriented from the assault Taylor, then 24 mother and
sharecropper with her husband, wandered the roads looking for direction and
safety.
Taylor’s friend Fannie Daniels had tried to find the sheriff
but he wasn’t around so she was able to get the former chief of police Will
Cook and Taylor’s father Benny Corbitt to go looking for her, they found her
near the local highway at about 3 AM and took her back to Cook’s workshop where
her husband and Daniels waited. Henry County Sheriff, George Gamble had also
been found in the interim and was there. Taylor bravely recounted the entire experience,
while she couldn’t identify the men the car was well known because of its
color.
Sheriff Gamble knew who owned the car and went to pick him up.
The young man was Hugo Wilson. When the sheriff brought him back to Cook’s
store, Taylor identified Wilson as one of the rapists. Wilson was taken to jail and confessed to participating in the attack. He gave up the names of the
other men including U.S. Army Private Herbert Lovett, Billy Howerton, Dillard
York, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper, and Robert Gamble. Wilson though insisted that
because they paid her, their kidnapping and brutalization could not be
considered rape. The sheriff released Wilson and never brought the other
men in.
Even though the sheriff appeared to have no intention of
actually making arrests the rapists and other Whites still attempted to intimidate
Taylor and her family, they firebombed her home and burned the porch and front
room. So they moved in with her father and siblings. Her father began spending
his nights in a tree with a shotgun watching the house only sleeping after the
sun had risen.
The NAACP chapter in Montgomery heard of the terrible assault
and treatment of Taylor and sent Rosa Parks to investigate the case. Parks
interviewed Taylor, Daniels, and her son, Taylor’s husband, father, and Will
Cook. Parks also came under surveillance by Deputy Sheriff Lewey Corbitt a
distant cousin of Taylor who was White. Taylor followed Parks around Abbeville
and drove by the older Corbitt’s home several times each day. Finally, Sheriff
Gamble himself had decided he was not willing to allow outsiders to influence anyone,
he stormed into the Corbitt home and told Parks to leave, “I don’t want any
troublemakers here in Abbeville,” he said. “If you don’t go, I’ll lock you up.”
Parks returned to Montgomery and started promptly launched
the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. The committee
flooded the South with fliers “decrying white attacks on black women,”
according to the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender.
A correspondent for the Defender, Fred Atwater, arrived in
Abbeville and reported that the lawyer representing the suspects in the case
had offered $600 to Willie Guy Taylor to silence his wife. “Nigger — ain’t $600
enough for raping your wife,” the story quoted the lawyer saying. The six
defendants were willing to pay $100 each “if Recy Taylor would forget.”
She refused to bow and pressed charges against the men. A
grand jury was brought together but they basically ignored the witness
statements and on Oct, 9 unanimously voted to dismiss the case.
Nationwide outrage was building in the case and the NCCAP
pressed with protests and letters, and they got the attention of Alabama
Governor Chauncey Sparks. Sparks made a
statement on Dec. 18th that he was ordering a full investigation of
the matter. This was followed up by Alabama Attorney General William McQueen
sending two of the lead investigators to Abbeville and interviewing everyone
involved. McQueen stated there were no legal issues about this just because one
grand jury did not bring back a case.
Despite these efforts when a second grand jury was impaneled, it
was once again 12 White men and they did what White men did in the Jim Crow
South and dismissed the case.
After this second failure to indict people began to move on to
other events. While there were still groups attempting to keep the focus on
Taylor’s case and they did raise some money by June there just was no longer
any political motivation or will to continue.
No longer feeling safe or comfortable in Abbeville Taylor, her
husband, and daughter moved to Montgomery for a few months living with Parks.
They then moved to central Florida and worked in the orange groves. By 1960
Taylor and her husband had separated and in 1961 Mr. Taylor died. Tragically Taylor’s
only child, her daughter, died in a car accident in 1967.
The case drifted into obscurity for decades until historian
Danielle L. McGuire included Taylor’s story in her book entitled, “At the
Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance” in 2011. The book led
to the Alabama State Legislature issuing a full apology to Taylor:
“That we acknowledge the lack of prosecution for
crimes committed against Recy Taylor by the government of the State of Alabama.
That we declare such 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.”
Taylor died in 2017
Sources:
At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and
Resistance — a New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the
Rise of Black Power, by the historian Danielle L. McGuire.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/obituaries/recy-taylor-alabama-rape-victim-dead.html
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/recy-taylor
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