Jim Crow, Rape and Civil Rights: A Forgotten History
Posted by onehundredflowers on February 14, 2011
This was first posted on The Root.
Although some African-American historians, such as Darlene Clark Hine, have cited incidents of rape as catalysts for the Great Migration, it hasn’t been part of the civil rights story in the major historical world.
“I think that has to do with, on some level, historians having a narrow focus on what ‘civil rights’ means,” said McGuire. “It has always meant voter registration and desegregation of public accommodations and schools, but in the 1940s in particular, the movement was really focused on human rights.”
Recy Taylor: A Symbol of Jim Crow’s Forgotten Horror
By Cynthia Gordy
After her brutal gang rape, Recy Taylor became a global symbol of American injustice and helped inspire the civil rights movement. So why has nobody heard of her today?
Sept. 3, 1944: It’s a damp evening in the Alabama black belt, nearly midnight, but services at Rock Hill Holiness Church in the small town of Abbeville have just let out. Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old sharecropper, sets out along the town’s fertile peanut plantations, accompanied for the walk home by two other worshippers from the African-American congregation. Moments later, a green Chevrolet rolls by — and their routine journey takes a horrifying turn.
Wielding knives and guns, seven white men get out of the car, according to Taylor and witnesses from a state investigation of the case. One shoves Taylor in the backseat; the rest squeeze in after her and ride off. Her panicked friends run to tell the sheriff.
After parking in a deserted grove of pecan trees, the men order the young wife and mother out at gunpoint, shouting at her to undress. Six of them rape Taylor that night. Once finished, they drive her back to the road, ordering her out again before roaring off into the darkness.
Days after the brutal attack, Taylor’s story traveled through word of mouth, catching the attention of a Montgomery NAACP activist named Rosa Parks. A seasoned anti-rape crusader, who focused on the sexual assaults of black women that were commonplace in the segregated South, Parks would eventually help bring the case international notice. Despite her efforts, however, in Jim Crow-era Alabama, Taylor’s assailants were never punished.
It’s curious, to say the least, that Taylor’s name is not mentioned in history books. While most analyses of circumstances that inspired the civil rights movement focus on black men — being lynched or railroaded into jail, or facing down segregationists — the stories of countless black women like Recy Taylor, who were raped by white men during the same era, have gone understated, if not overlooked entirely.
Nearly 70 years later, having such a brutal attack swept under the rug is still a source of pain for a surviving victim.
“Wasn’t nothing done about it,” Taylor, now 91, told The Root in a phone interview from her Florida home. “The sheriff never even said he was sorry it happened. I think more people should know about it … but ain’t nobody [in Abbeville] saying nothing.”
Organizing a National Movement
At the time, others — more than she ever knew — did speak out in defense of Taylor. Her brother Robert Corbitt, now 74, was just 8 years old when his eldest sister was kidnapped, but he remembers that night well, and all that followed.
He recalls crying on the porch of their childhood home as their father, Benny Corbitt, went out looking for her. “He came back by the house about three times, and each time, his shirt was wringing with sweat,” he told The Root. “Nobody slept that night.”
Two days later, he remembers, someone threw a firebomb at the home of Taylor, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter. “After that, they moved in with us,” said Corbitt. “At night, my father would sit in a tree and guard the house with a shotgun.”
The following month, in a farce of a grand jury trial at which none of the assailants even showed up, an all-white, all-male jury elected not to indict.
The family didn’t know it back then, but Parks, dispatched by the Montgomery NAACP to investigate the case, was setting the gears in motion for a far-reaching campaign. “Miss Parks told me to go with her to Montgomery until things were clear,” said Taylor, who stayed for three months in a rooming house, arranged for by Parks, before returning home. “She was trying to get something done. I’m not sure what. I was young and didn’t know nothing about law and stuff like that.”
Parks saw an opportunity to hold up Taylor’s story as a national example of Southern injustice. She partnered with other progressive groups — including the now mostly forgotten Southern Negro Youth Congress, the defense team of the Scottsboro Boys, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and other labor organizers, as well as communist networks — to form the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. The coalition became a national movement that the Chicago Defender called “the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade,” and daily stories on the case were printed in newspapers across the nation, from Baltimore to Los Angeles.
But not in the tiny town of Abbeville, where Taylor’s family was largely unaware of the proceedings. Corbitt had quite a shock, years later, as a soldier stationed in Germany. “A German guy asked me where I was from, and when I told him Alabama, he started to tell a story he knew about that happened there,” he said. “He was talking about my sister.”
Danielle McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University and author of the recently published book At the Dark End of the Street, documenting Taylor’s story as well as others from the civil rights era, says that the broader goal of the Committee for Equal Justice was to quash the legacy of Jim Crow. “They used the horror of her story to highlight the hypocrisy of the United States — at war around the world for democracy, and yet there was no democracy at home,” McGuire told The Root. “They might have not seen Recy Taylor as sophisticated enough to be a spokesperson for the campaign, so a lot of this was organized without the family’s knowledge.”
The effort included a massive letter-writing campaign to Alabama Gov. Chauncey Sparks in order to shame the state into bringing Taylor’s abductors to trial. Worried about the impact on Alabama’s reputation, Sparks arranged an investigation and even got admission statements from the assailants. “He and the attorney general believed the guys were guilty, and they were ready to do something,” explained McGuire. The only problem was that in Alabama law, a criminal case can’t proceed without an indictment in the county where the crime happened.
“They just were not going to indict their neighbors and sons in Abbeville,” said McGuire. There was no further hearing.
A Forgotten History
As the years passed, talk of the incident faded out. Somewhere along the way, it seems that history also forgot Recy Taylor and black women like her, many of whom also testified about the crimes committed against them. Although some African-American historians, such as Darlene Clark Hine, have cited incidents of rape as catalysts for the Great Migration, it hasn’t been part of the civil rights story in the major historical world.
“I think that has to do with, on some level, historians having a narrow focus on what ‘civil rights’ means,” said McGuire. “It has always meant voter registration and desegregation of public accommodations and schools, but in the 1940s in particular, the movement was really focused on human rights.”
Meanwhile, Taylor and her family did their best to forget and move on. Corbitt eventually settled in New York City, but during a visit home in 1999, he and his sister got to talking about the rape. “She started to cry,” he said. “I didn’t realize she was still hurting that bad. She tried to hold it inside all those years, but she talked freely to me. When I retired in 2001 and moved back to Abbeville, I decided to devote my time to trying to find some way to help her get justice.”
Corbitt spent days at the library, poring over microfilms of newspapers from the era. Nothing turned up but missing pages. The county courthouse had no record of the incident. He had nearly given up when, in 2008, he typed his sister’s name into an online search engine. Up popped an essay by Danielle McGuire referencing the case. Finally: historical recognition that this had happened.
“The article said the name of the man that held the gun on her and forced her to get in the car,” Corbitt said. “Just exposing this man’s name was a little measure of justice.”
After meeting McGuire and learning more about Abbeville’s handling of his sister’s assault, he redirected his anger from the rapists to the police. “All of the men admitted that they kidnapped and raped her, but the police covered for them and said they didn’t do it,” he said. “That was a hard pill to swallow.”
Corbitt doesn’t think he’s asking for much these days. “I’d like a public apology from the city of Abbeville and the state of Alabama,” he said. “Most of the white people here don’t know anything about what happened, because the police kept it such a secret.”
It’s unclear what legal options the family has today, but because Alabama has no statute of limitations on rape, McGuire posits that Taylor’s case could potentially be reopened if the assailants are still alive. “There may be a possibility that they could sue the county or sheriff’s department for obstruction of justice, given the cover-up,” she said. “A creative attorney could certainly find a way.”
As for Taylor, she agrees with her brother that an apology is the least anyone could do. She also blames herself for some of the hush-hush nature of her story. “I should have talked more about it too myself,” she said. “At the time, I didn’t want nobody to think something like that happened to me. I thought folks were going to talk about me and say, ‘You was raped.’ I was ashamed of it, and I didn’t know how to go about talking about it.”
She pauses, lost for a moment in her thoughts. “It was a long time ago,” she says finally. “But I still think something should have been done about it.”
Cynthia Gordy is the Washington reporter for The Root. Follow her on Twitter.
RW Harvey said
I have always thought the Chinese government during the time of Mao was right to make rape a crime punishable by death.
Labor Shall Rule said
What? I hope that you only say things like that on Kasama and other Marxist-leaning sites. I’m aware that there are many male chauvinists who use rare stories of false rape allegations to make anti-feminist points, but we can’t ignore the lack of impartiality in the justice system. I would say that we need to be concerned about the rights of suspected offenders since their rights are ours as well. Some women lie, and because of the grotesque and violating nature of the accusation, guilt is always presumed more than innocence. If we followed your fixation with that often brutal revolutionary state, false convictions would result in execution.
PatrickSMcNally said
The Scottsboro Boys were accused of rape. I would assume that no one here on this board claims they should have been given the death penalty. That’s the type of case example which supports LSR’s point.
RW Harvey said
It is amazing that after reading the above essay on the brutal gang-rape of a Black woman, you, LSR, can make the leap to the fact that some women lie about being raped. It shows me once again the deep-rootedness of fear and hatred of women. Curiously, there is no direct rebuttal of the imposition of this law in revolutionary China. Yet in a society where female infanticide, foot-binding, rape and prostitution haunted women as the lowest of the low, what better way to go from zero to 60 than by making rape punshibale by death? If that move doesn’t signify a codification of the slogan “women hold up half the sky” better than moaning over “men’s right too,” then I don’t know what would.
I most pointedly referred to revolutionary China precisely because of cases like the Scottsboro Boys; I have no illusions that making rape punishable by the death penalty here in America would, for one minute, end the oppression of women and would exacerbate the contradictions of race and class.
Lastly, to make equivalent the rape of women with men being falsely accused spits in the face of the hourly, daily, oppression women face in the real world. Isn’t it time to radically stand against this first and oldest and most entrenched form of oppression?
Mike E said
There is a tension here:
First, it is important (as Harvey argues) for revolutionaries to recognize rape as a particularly heinous and reactionary crime. It has been (far more than generally acknowledged) normalized within class society — and represents both an assault on a person and part of a larger social mechanism for the domination of a gender.
And it has always been important that revolutionary armies (like the Maoist Peoples Liberation Army of China’s revolution) treated rape as an intolerable offense. (It was part of the most basic Eight Rules of Discipline for soldiers of that army: “Don’t take liberties with women.”
Often, I have heard it said “all armies rape” — but, in fact, that is not true. Armies of liberation do not — and it is a measure of the importance (centrality) of women’s liberation in our era.
On the other hand, there are obvious problems with execution as a punishment.
Two worth mentioning:
First, that people make mistakes. As Mao said (discussing this problem)
The second reason to be cautious of execution is that they can intimidate the people broadly — and dampen their eagerness for political life. In the opening days of a revolution, the occasional measured, public punishment of notorious reactionaries is an encouragement to the oppressed — because it is a real sign of “change of sky.” In china’s revolution, the execution of the most notorious feudal landlords and warlords (who sold off peoples children, or allowed families to starve or, yes, who raped the women in surrounding villages) was an unmistakable sign that social justice had arrived, and that power relations had profoundly reversed.
And it is also true that there are many times in a revolution where there are few punishment options. In the liberated zones of a guerrilla war there are rarely jails or prisons available to the new political power — and so there is an inevitably shorter list of possible punishments (i.e. public warning, public group criticism, beatings, expulsion, and ultimately execution). It may be necessary in a revolutionary army, to have execution as the punishment for rape by its soldiers — to set a standard, and to enforce the political character of the army — especially if the crime was notorious among the people and raised questions (among the people) about whether this revolutionary army actually served the oppressed and whether it was different from the forces it challenges.
But such use of execution (within the ranks of the revolution) may not mean that such extreme means should be continued within the future socialist society (where socialism itself creates new options for the transformation and supervision of people.
So while we can understand why execution for rape might have been a policy (at times) within the ranks of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army — it is also important to note that if executions are widespread, especially if they continue after the consolidation of a new order, and obviously if they become a routine response to political opposition, or if their use extends to too many crimes, the new peoples forces (and their state) emerges as a frightening figure to everyone watching (and it becomes intimidating to the broader population whose engagement and criticism are essential for the advance of the revolution).
One final point: It is important for revolutionaries to grapple with the question of judicial procedures. My view is that we need to support them and create them.
Part of the bitterness of the discussion of rape in the United States is (as we all know) that the “rape of white womanhood” was a blood libel used to justify the pogroms and horrific lynchings of black people. (Since this is Black History Month, let me just give as one example our Kasama posting on the Massacre in Tulsa Oklahoma.) In other words, the problem of false accusations of rape is (as we all know) very real, and part of our most painful memories.
The demand for judicial structures (standards of evidence, impartial and public hearings, a committed defense counsel, involvement of both trained judges and juries of peers, known standards of punishment, common standards for defendants regardless of race and class, etc) are important for the creation of justice (out of a previous society that did not provide justice to women, the poor and non-white).
This may not be possible (or politically necessary) in the heady days of revolutionary uprising (where the people themselves sometimes administer justice to well exposed oppressors) — but it is (I believe) necessary once the revolution sits down to consolidate a new order.
Labor Shall Rule said
I didn’t even read the article yet. I was addressing you, so stop trying to divorce the first comment from my response.
It is not radical to have every convicted rapist put to death. Your line is right-wing vigilantism, historic nostalgia for extremely punitive legal systems, and a patriarchal paternalism for women.
You acknowledged that you supported that punishment, but then retracted your support on grounds that it basically wouldn’t work here.
Really, it wouldn’t work anywhere. You universalize (that is, ignore the complexities and contradictions) of rapists by applying equal punishment to them all. It’s a method that reminds me of the “justice” applied to dissidents during the purges of the thirties.
All rape is bad. But a dude that has drunk unconsensual sex at a frat party and a serial rapist that attacks female joggers at night are not one in the same. A revolutionary society (that is, not like old ones of the past) would have to recognize those differences. While retribution has to be applied where it’s just to, reforming rapists and creating a culture that values equal relationships over dominant and violent ones should be more important.
Mike E said
RW Harvey writes:
LSR writes:
It doesn’t help to speak past each other.
“Punishable by death” doesn’t mean “every convicted rapist put to death.” It means that in some cases, the death penalty is available.
On the details: I have always heard that there were executions during the revolutionary war for rape by armed soldiers (an act that is both criminal and also undermines the relations of the revolution with the people). I would be curious if this continued generally “under Mao” (since my impression is that his approach was to limit executions, and the current expansion of executions is part of the post-Mao conservatism).
LSR talks of:
That needs to be broken down:
1) During the actual revolutionary war, there were cases where the people punished particularly notorious rapists (among the feudal ruling classes). This was not “rightwing vigilantism” but the kind of popular justice that happens during revolutions.
2) As I said above, if there is not a period of “red terror” in such ways, the most oppressed often do not see (or believe) that they can truly stand up and act.
3) I don’t believe that having strict punishment (by the state and judicial system) is “a patriarchal paternalism for women” — on the contrary, it is part of justice. Is it paternalism to create a revolutionary state (and establish new revolutionary social norms) that criminalize ancient and hated forms of oppressing women? Or is that part of the reason people create revolutionary armies, make revolution, and then build new revolutionary societies — i.e. so that new social relations are normalized and generalized.
LSR writes:
I understand that there are some people who don’t see shades of difference. And in such matters there are many shades of difference (including degree of violence, degree of consent etc.).
However, it is also worth pointing out that “drunk unconsensual sex” is rape — and that we need to transform conditions so that such rape is exposed and prevented.
And if “a dude” (!?) thinks it is ok to rape unconscious women at frat parties, this is a major transgression, a crime, and should be treated as such. And it is helpful to make that very clear so that the rapists are not surprised to discover that their “fun” is considered criminal. And I have do disagree that rape at frat parties is somehow inherently different from serial rape of joggers — people who commit (and organize) the rape of women at frat parties are often (precisely!) “serial rapists” who set up conditions where women overdrink (without knowing it is happening) and are then raped. It is often planned, conscious, and organized.
And when such discussions of frat house rape (and startled claims of innocence) come up:
I am reminded of a Brazilian rancher and his sons who were put on trial for murder — because they went out on their ranch hunting indigenous people and shot those they found. Their defense was that they didn’t know this was a crime — and one of them demanded to know when it had been made a crime.]
Labor Shall Rule said
I don’t think I claimed that the frat boy example couldn’t be classified as rape. I was just arguing that there are different degrees of pathology in rape offenders. There is premeditation as well.
Let’s look at two different examples. The frat boy is having a drunken make-out session with his girlfriend and wants to take it further but the girl doesn’t. The serial rapist drives in his car every night, waits for a woman to run into a dimly-lit alley, and beats and rapes her. You can not tell me that they should be treated different in a court of justice.
RW Harvey said
Thanks, Mike; a much more thorough and all-sided assessment and one that I agree with.
TP LSR: I take an unequivable stand against all forms of womens’ oppression and have faith that a revolutionary society will not rush to judgement, will indeed make every effort to parse out truth from fictions, and overall bend every effort socially and ideologically to erease rape from its society and as quickly as possible remove the death penalty because the crime itself has whithered away.
Let us not allow our fears and our legalisms blunt our determination to stand agains the vile oppressions of women in their many manifestations.
Mike E said
Again LSR, you are confusing things with a strawman: No one (including RW Harvey) was arguing there are not distinctions to be made (including, yes, premeditation, violence, and patterns of repeated behavior). And no one was arguing that all convicted rapists should be executed. (That is simply YOUR invention and red herring here).
You write:
But clearly no one (including RW Harvey’s brief comment above) argued that different acts shouldn’t be treated differently.
The issue is HOW different are these different kinds of rape… and you seem to think they are VERY different (not just in degree but in nature).
Let’s take your example:
Well, what is your point?
If he “wants to take it further” and does so over her wishes, protestation and resistance then it is rape. If she is unconscious (and therefore unable to protest or resist) then it is also rape.
It is a crime (a crime against this woman, a crime against women generally, and a crime against the social norms that socialist revolution seeks to establish).
Our communist morality would treat this as an extreme and intolerably reactionary thing to do — certainly something requiring transformation, public condemnation of the offender.
Rapists should be confronted with their crimes and asked to publicly address their act, and required to actively transform both outlook and behavior, so that they don’t do this again and so women generally are (finally!) liberated from this kind of thing.
And transformation can take places in various ways — that include counseling, but may also require monitoring, coercion and even confinement (depending on the person and the crime).
Let’s be clear: the idea that it is so very different to rape your girlfriend (compared to a stranger) is tied to a very particular male supremacist idea: that men have a right to sex from those they are intimate with, and so therefore taking sex (without consent) is not as bad if the person is your girlfriend or wife.
This is an ancient and deeply embedded view that sees women as the property of their husbands. Uprooting this very idea is an important part of the fight against male supremacy and patriarchy. It is not ok. It is not understandable. It is (in fact) the issue at hand — uprooting such ideas is part of the reason people make socialist revolution.
Labor Shall Rule said
I agree wholeheartedly with rw’s last comment.
Mike, he explicitly said that it was right to make rape a crime punishable by death. Read that first comment a few times over. I also don’t know where I implied that inter-marital rape is fine or less violating – this in itself is a red herring.
Stiofan said
Mike wrote:
I have always heard that there were executions during the revolutionary war for rape by armed soldiers (an act that is both criminal and also undermines the relations of the revolution with the people). I would be curious if this continued generally “under Mao” (since my impression is that his approach was to limit executions, and the current expansion of executions is part of the post-Mao conservatism).
I do not know about this area specifically, but this raises a question of Mao’s intentions and the actual policies in regards to executions carried out in the PRC. It is a complex relationship and I think illustrates the danger of attributing too much power to Mao alone.
It is without a doubt that after liberation Mao did not want to pursue a vengeful policy towards the Guomindang and their supporters. It is also true that as the Nationalist army retreated only some of them escaped to Taiwan. I have read credible estimates that over a million men with arms remained behind as well as GMD political networks and agents. The reality is that despite Mao’s intentions, the PRC did eventually take an energetic campaign to destroy these armed groups and their political networks and the documentation I know of says that 710,000 were executed.
Like many things in China history, the numbers are staggering and can be interpreted and spun from many angles. Was Mao merely lying in public when what he really wanted was the mass extermination of political opponents? This argument is made again about the Hundred Flowers campaign to criticize the Chinese Communist Party and was initiated by Mao. Did Mao just pretend that he wanted to criticize the abuses by party officials so that he could then attack those making the criticism? In both cases this line of attack is ideologically motivated and historically impoverished. The anti-GMD campaign after liberation was an extension of the civil war. Not every former nationalist soldier was killed and in fact many joined the PLA and fought heroically in the Korean War. The persecution of those who joined the Hundred Flowers campaign was lead by Deng Xiaoping and represented a severe political defeat for Mao.
Mao wanted a great many things, and had many goals that were not achieved as the current state of the PRC testifies. As essential as Mao was to the Chinese revolution it was not simply his ideas, or intentions, that determined Chinese history.
RW Harvey said
If we, for a sngle moment, thought the oppression of women was somehow lightening up under American-style democracy, feast your eyes on South Dakota’s legislative efforts to make them murder of abortion providers (or anyone else threatening the life of a fetus), “Justifiable homicide”:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/15-11
Aunt Vic Keller said
In this conversation, we see an important issue derailed into ruminations of pipe dreams and hypothetical pie-in-the-sky fantasies about how rapists will be treated after a purely hypothetical socialist revolution.
In the immediate context we have a legal system based on procrustean codes and elite patriarchal bureaucrats which seldom ever gives justice to rapists.
In the immediate context it is necessary for victims of patriarchy to defend themselves by any means necessary.
In the immediate context my sympathy is %100 for the exploited women of the world and not the “frat boys”.
Labor Shall Rule said
Well, seeing that we are revolutionaries, the revolution we are fighting for is in itself a hypothetical thing. Our scope of what it should look like and what structures exist during it should be vast as so.
My sympathy is 100% with the exploited women but it is not for lapses in due process. I don’t see how it is not possible to be for one but not the other. I also don’t see why “frat boy” is being punctuated like that…is it insinuating that I could care less about that boy’s victim?
Mike E said
I agree with you here Labor Shall Rule.
AVK writes:
Is it either or? Are all frat boys rapists? Does opposition to the exploitation mean treating all frat boys as rapists?
There is (as many know) political views that actually say so — that imply that all men are inherently the enemies of women’s liberation. It is part of the kinds of identity politics that assume there are no real allies in politics, that relative privilege is utterly corrupting and defining, that real understanding cannot exist outside direct personal experience and so on.
And I don’t see what is wrong with discussing what we plan to accomplish with a revolution — how (after all) can we create a revolutionary movement if we don’t discuss what it would accomplish and why it is needed?