TW: Rape
Recy Taylor May Finally See Alabama Acknowledge Her 1944 Rape
Recy Taylor was abducted and raped at gunpoint by seven white men in Abbeville, Ala., on Sept. 3, 1944. Her attack, one of uncounted numbers on black women throughout the Jim Crow era in the South, sparked a national movement for justice and an international outcry, but justice never came. Now, decades later, there may finally be some solace for Taylor, 91, as Alabama state Rep. Dexter Grimsley tries to make his state issue a formal apology.
Reached by phone on Monday, Grimsley confirmed he is drafting a resolution for a state apology to Taylor. “The circumstances merit it,” he said. “It’s something that should be done. Recy Taylor found herself in a situation that wasn’t responded to, the way that the law would respond to something today.”
The FBI is currently investigating dozens of civil rights-era murders, mostly of men. But the sexual violence visited upon women like Taylor has never commanded the official attention of the FBI and other federal and state officials who have tried to right the crimes of our past.
“From slavery through the better part of the 20th century, white men in the segregated South abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity and often impunity,” explained historian Danielle McGuire, whose new book “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance” was the first history of white-on-black sexual violence and black women’s organized resistance to it. “They lured black women and girls away from home with promises of work and steady wages; attacked them on the job; abducted them at gunpoint while traveling to or from home, work, church or school; and sexually harassed them at bus stops, grocery stores and in other public spaces.”
New awareness of Taylor’s case, and of the pervasiveness of many more cases like it, has begun attracting new bands of supporters who want justice for past crimes of sexual violence against black women—from members of an online social network for social change, to the NAACP Alabama State Conference, to a black lawyers’ association in Michigan, to individual letter writers and callers from all over the country who have contacted Taylor’s family.
Read the rest at the source.
I wonder how many hundreds more cases are just like this one...
Previously this month: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four.
Recy Taylor May Finally See Alabama Acknowledge Her 1944 Rape
Recy Taylor was abducted and raped at gunpoint by seven white men in Abbeville, Ala., on Sept. 3, 1944. Her attack, one of uncounted numbers on black women throughout the Jim Crow era in the South, sparked a national movement for justice and an international outcry, but justice never came. Now, decades later, there may finally be some solace for Taylor, 91, as Alabama state Rep. Dexter Grimsley tries to make his state issue a formal apology.
Reached by phone on Monday, Grimsley confirmed he is drafting a resolution for a state apology to Taylor. “The circumstances merit it,” he said. “It’s something that should be done. Recy Taylor found herself in a situation that wasn’t responded to, the way that the law would respond to something today.”
The FBI is currently investigating dozens of civil rights-era murders, mostly of men. But the sexual violence visited upon women like Taylor has never commanded the official attention of the FBI and other federal and state officials who have tried to right the crimes of our past.
“From slavery through the better part of the 20th century, white men in the segregated South abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity and often impunity,” explained historian Danielle McGuire, whose new book “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance” was the first history of white-on-black sexual violence and black women’s organized resistance to it. “They lured black women and girls away from home with promises of work and steady wages; attacked them on the job; abducted them at gunpoint while traveling to or from home, work, church or school; and sexually harassed them at bus stops, grocery stores and in other public spaces.”
New awareness of Taylor’s case, and of the pervasiveness of many more cases like it, has begun attracting new bands of supporters who want justice for past crimes of sexual violence against black women—from members of an online social network for social change, to the NAACP Alabama State Conference, to a black lawyers’ association in Michigan, to individual letter writers and callers from all over the country who have contacted Taylor’s family.
Read the rest at the source.
I wonder how many hundreds more cases are just like this one...
Previously this month: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four.
This is one of many things that I've been think about for a while. I honestly question how unified mainstream black anti-racist groups are if they can't talk about this, and they are ususaly run by black men. And this is where the "~STRONG BLACK WOMAN~" bullshit needs to die in a fire because the hardening of oneself in a racialized misogynist world is not something that should to be waved around as a way to solve this.
ranting/rambling aside, I'm just taking this alll in.
So the more this is talked about, the better. And I hope everyone reads the rest of the article.
If anyone is interested in a related and underreported topic, Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights is a documentary in production.
I want to read this book!
Jesus fucking Christ. I'm kind of in awe of Recy Taylor's strength and bravery. Coming out publicly about this now would get you so disgustingly shamed and victim-blamed. I can't imagine what it was like to do so in 1944, while also surviving the assault itself.
Rape is such a common tool to try and conquer and subjugate people, I think one of the things that enrages me the most about it is how those subjugated communities then internalize rape culture. There's no support or outcry for the women who are assaulted. It's kind of like being told by your own community that your life and suffering doesn't matter.
It's a wonder she didn't just curl up in a corner and never speak or move again. I hope this apology happens soon, and i hope that she can get some kind of peace from it.
It's equally disturbing to think that these cases have simply been glossed over and forgotten. When will rape become as huge a crime in the public mind as it is in the individuals?
and yet how many black men were falsely accused of doing the same thing and then publicly murdered/lynched? smh.
Edited at 2012-02-06 09:23 pm (UTC)