Sepetember 7, 2010
Civil Rights Movement, Rape, Rosa Parks, s*xual Assault, Women
Picture photo participants below: Recy Taylor, Willie Guy, and their child, Joyce Lee Taylor.
In 2008, the Department of Justice received over $1 million to pursue racially-motivated crimes committed during the Civil Rights era. However, the bill, known as Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, only allowed the Justice Department to investigate "crimes that resulted in a death." By limiting the scope of the bill, the Justice Department and other organizations focus almost exclusively on racial crimes committed agianst African- American men- a focus, the New York Times recently noted, that had not yielded significant prosecutions. Unfortunately, the crimes committed against black women during Jim Crow often remain unsolved and worse, unknown. Perhaps Congress should revise the bill and allow the Justice Department to investigate the flipside of lynching and racialized murder: the rape of black women.
On September 3, 1944, a carload of white men abducted Recy Taylor, a slender, copper-colored twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper as she walked home from church in Abbeville, Alabama. The six men drove her to a lonely wooded area outside of town and gang-raped her at gunpoint. When they finished, someone blindfolded her and shoved her back into the car. Back on the highway, the men stopped and ordered Taylor out of the car. "Don't move until we get away from here," one of them yelled. Taylor heard the car disappear into the night. She pulled off the blindfold, got her bearings, and began the long walk home.
That night she told her husband, her father, and the local sheriff what happened. A few days later, a telephone rang at the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama. E.D. Nixon, the local president, promised to send his best investigator to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.
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Wednesday, September 8th 2010 at 10:31AM
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