Mandy

Almost 67 years ago during the Jim Crow era,  Recy Taylor was raped and held at gunpoint by seven white men in Abbeville, Alabama on September 3 in 1944.  Unfortunately, her rape was one of many cases where a black woman never got justice.  Because the multiple men who raped her were white men from priveleged families, they never went to jail or went to trial, although they openly admitted to the viscous gang rape.  Taylor was a mother of a 2 year-old and married at the time of her attack.  She is now 91 years of age and resides in Alabama.  Yesterday, March 21, over 6,000 members of Change.org, emailed Abbeville Mayor Ryan Blalock.  As a direct result of this, Alabama State Rep. Dexter Grimsley personally apologized to Recy and her family for Alabama’s failure to prosecute her rapists and deny her justice all of these years.

In her book At the Dark End of the Street Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks. In taking on this case, ...