Rape victim’s story is window on injustice, activism
LOS ANGELES — When Oprah Winfrey saluted unheralded #MeToo crusaders at the Golden Globes last January, she chose a rape victim from 1940s Alabama to drive home her point.
“Recy Taylor, a name I know, and I think you should know, too,” Winfrey said, sketching the outlines of the African-American woman’s assault by six white youths and her quest for justice.
Taylor’s wrenching story and its connection to female civil rights activists, most notably Rosa Parks, are illuminated in filmmaker Nancy Buirski’s documentary “The Rape of Recy Taylor.” The film is airing 9 p.m. EDT Monday on the Starz channel and available on the Starz app.
Taylor, who died last December at age 97 shortly after the film’s theatrical release, is seen and heard briefly in it. Her words are powerful despite her frailty.
“I can’t but tell the truth of what they done to me,”
she said, condemning both her attackers and the authorities who weren’t “concerned about what happened to me.”
The film mixes orthodox documentary elements — accounts from Taylor’s relatives and other contemporaries, the perspectives of historians — with haunting visual touches and music such as Fannie Lou Hamer’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” It blends into somber, unsettling poetry.
There are clips from so-called “race films,” vintage movies made by AfricanAmerican moviemakers, including one in which a distraught woman flees from unseen danger. In a scene from Oscar Micheaux’s “Within Our Gates” (1920), a white man attacks a black woman.
The movie excerpts help “communicate very quickly that this didn’t just happen to Recy Taylor” and help broaden one woman’s ordeal to a “much larger canvas” about the peril black women faced, filmmaker Buirski said.
In 1944 Taylor, then a 24-year-old married mother, was walking to her Abbeville, Alabama, home after an evening church service with two friends, an older woman and her son. Local whites out joyriding stopped them and, at gunpoint, demanded Taylor got in their car.
They raped her repeatedly and, after forcing money into her hand, released her after she agreed to remain silent.
She stumbled home “crying and upset,” recalls her brother, Robert Corbitt. “Those young boys felt like they can do it and get away with it. They really felt like they could. They know nothing was going to happen to them.”
But Taylor fought back, recounting the assault to the local sheriff. Her courage put her family at risk — their home was firebombed — and eventually led to two faint-hearted, failed efforts to bring the case to trial in the Jim Crow South.