Justice Denied!!

In October 1944, a Henry County grand jury heard Taylor’s case. All seven alleged perpetrators were identified, after one man who was picked up by the sheriff the night of the rape identified them and confessed most of the details. But no evidence was gathered, and the grand jury returned no indictments.
It might have ended there, but in November 1944, Rosa Parks and other prominent activists, supported by national labor unions, African-American organizations and women’s groups launched the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, which brought her case to the national stage. International attention pressured segregationist Gov. Chauncey Sparks to grudgingly launch an investigation in December 1944. At various times, both the Henry County sheriff and the perpetrators lied to investigators with claims that Taylor was paid and was widely known as a prostitute.
Despite further admissions from perpetrators, signed affidavits from eyewitnesses, and other evidence, a second grand jury in February 1945 returned no indictments.
It therefore came as some surprise to Taylor’s youngest brother, Robert Corbitt in November 2007, when he typed his sister’s name into an Internet search box and found an article by McGuire detailing his sister’s story, answering many questions that had long gone unanswered, and correcting the alleged perpetrators’ lies about his sister.
“That was the first tiny bit of justice that we got,” Corbitt, 74, said in a phone interview.
Corbitt and Taylor are far from alone in waiting for justice. “My research covers about 64 cases of white on black rape from 1940 to 1975 and is not exhaustive in any way,” McGuire said about her book in an e-mail interview.
“I found black women’s testimonies of sexual violence everywhere I looked,” added McGuire. “I focused almost entirely on cases that had already become public in one way or another—mainly through a court hearing, congressional testimony, a letter to an NAACP or DOJ official or a newspaper story. I did not do a county by county survey in any southern state, nor did my research cover every southern state.
“Black women often testified about their assaults—in churches, courtrooms, and in congressional hearings. They wrote letters to their local NAACP chapter, to the Justice Department, and to other organizations. Their stories appeared on the front pages of black newspapers (and sometimes ‘white’ newspapers) throughout the 1940s and 1950s. And nearly every memoir written by a black woman who participated in the long freedom struggle, including the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, talks about interracial sexual violence (either their own victimization or someone close to them) as being a motivator or catalyst for their entree into civil rights activism. A small sample includes: Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Daisy Bates, Rosa Parks, Melba Patillo Beals, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Fannie Lou Hamer, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Assata Shakur.”
Taylor’s willingness at age 24 to speak about what happened to her helped to spark an under-recognized mass-movement against sexual violence and racism in the 1940s. Further, McGuire shows in her book that the mobilization by Rosa Parks and others in the 1940s on behalf of Taylor established the community networks that became the basis for the Montgomery bus boycott a decade later.
Taylor’s willingness at 91 to again speak publicly about her experience has sparked the very new, mounting call to address the untold number of rapes that Taylor and other black women have historically suffered at the hands of whites.