“When I came back I saw that it had garnered 1,000 signatures,” DiBranco said.
That was on Feb. 28. Now there are more than 2,100 signatures—all gathered organically, without any outreach from DiBranco to website members.
Following the initial success of the petition, DiBranco got in touch with Corbitt, who decided to put the petition under his name. She also got in touch with Grimsley, who represents Henry County, which includes Abbeville. Grimsley had read McGuire’s book and was watching the petition.
“We have a saying in the African American community that you want to give a person their flowers when they’re alive,” said Detroit attorney Diane Hutcherson, board member and past president of the Wolverine Bar Association, a Michigan group for African-American lawyers that has added its support to widening efforts to win recognition of the injustice Taylor suffered. “This was a woman who spoke out when she didn’t have to, despite enormous threats,” Hutcherson continued. “We want to give her her flowers while she’s living, meaning the apology and, if possible, a Presidential Medal of Freedom.”
NAACP Alabama State Conference President Bernard Simelton, when reached by phone on Tuesday, said that his organization wants “to see justice is served in this case and to see individuals responsible held accountable.”
Robert Corbitt says he’s been receiving letters and phone calls from around the country, as well as from Abbeville residents, white and black. “I haven’t got one negative comment about it,” he said.
“There is a particular silence around rape with black women,” noted Aishah Shahidah Simmons, filmmaker of NO! The Rape Documentary. “It is outrageous that many prominent civil rights leaders haven’t spoken out against” these crimes, Simmons said. “By not addressing them we’re saying black women’s lives are not important. It plays a role [in] how black women’s lives are viewed contemporarily.”Six of the southern, formerly segregated states place no statute of limitations on the crime of rape: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. Yet local police and county sheriffs rarely have the staff or the budgets to conduct investigations. Furthermore, in small communities officials may lack motivation because they would be investigating their own relatives or the politically powerful.
When it comes to decades-old racial murders, the FBI can investigate cases even when there is no federal jurisdiction. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act of 2008 directs the FBI to investigate and to do community outreach with the express purpose of supporting or encouraging state and local action.
Asked if the FBI could play a similar role in addressing decades-old racially motivated rapes, FBI spokesman Christopher Allen said, “The public is always welcome to report an allegation of a crime to their local FBI office, where it will be reviewed to determine if a federal violation exists.”
No special consideration would be made. “We would handle [It] as we do every other allegation of a crime: on its own merits,” said Allen.
Robert Corbitt has for some years been tracking the lives of the seven men alleged to have raped his sister: Hugo Wilson, Dillard York, Luther Lee, William Howerton, Joe Culpepper, Robert Gamble and Herbert Lovett. Six of the men are now dead, according to Corbitt, and there is one who may still be alive.
But Corbitt and his sister Taylor aren’t focused on the perpetrators now. They are focused, instead, on the state’s apology for failing to provide justice. They want the truth officially acknowledged by the city and state that so completely failed Taylor.
“I would like to see her have some peace before she leaves this earth,” Corbitt said. “What hurt her the most was their saying this never happened.”
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