Apologies sought for Jim Crow-era rapes

October 16, 2010|Errin Haines, Associated Press

ATLANTA — Years before Rosa Parks fought for justice from her seat on a Montgomery bus, she fought for Recy Taylor.

Parks was an NAACP activist crisscrossing Alabama in 1944 when she came across the case of Taylor, a 24-year-old wife and mother who was gang-raped and dumped on the side of a road. Taylor survived only to watch two all-white, all-male grand juries decline to indict the six white men who admitted to authorities that they assaulted her.

Taylor was one of many black women attacked by white men during an era in which sexual assault was used to informally enforce Jim Crow segregation. Their pain galvanized an anti-rape crusade that ultimately took a back seat to the push to dismantle officially sanctioned separation of the races, and slowly faded from the headlines.

Many of these rape victims never got justice and the desire for closure is still there, more than 60 years later — leaving some to wonder what, if anything, can be done to address the wrongs done to them.

“I didn’t get nothing, ain’t nothing been done about it,’’ Taylor, now 90, said in a telephone interview from her central Florida home. The AP is revealing Taylor’s identity because she has publicly identified herself as a victim of sexual assault.

“I was an honest person and living right,’’ Taylor said. “They shouldn’t have did that. I never give them no reason to do it.’’

Evelyn Lowery, an activist whose husband, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, worked with Martin Luther King Jr., suggested that an apology from the government could be a start to the healing.

Taylor is not inclined to pursue a civil case. She believes most, if not all, of her attackers are dead. But she does find the idea of an official apology appealing.

“It would mean a whole lot to me,’’ Taylor said. “The people who done this to me . . . they can’t do no apologizing. Most of them is gone.’’