Recy Taylor facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Recy Taylor
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Mrs. Recy Taylor in 1944
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Recy Corbitt
December 31, 1919 Abbeville, Alabama, U.S.
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| Died | December 28, 2017 (aged 97) Abbeville, Alabama, U.S.
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| Occupation | Sharecropper |
Recy Taylor (née Corbitt; December 31, 1919 – December 28, 2017) was an African-American woman from Abbeville in Henry County, Alabama. She was born and raised in a sharecropping family in the Jim Crow era Southern United States.
On September 3, 1944, Taylor was kidnapped while leaving church. Despite the men's confessions to authorities, two grand juries subsequently declined to indict the men; no charges were ever brought against her assailants.
In 2011, the Alabama Legislature officially apologized on behalf of the state "for its failure to prosecute her attackers." Taylor's refusal to remain silent, and the subsequent court cases were among the early instances of nationwide protest and activism among the African-American community, and ended up providing an organizational spark in the civil rights movement.
At the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, while accepting the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, Oprah Winfrey discussed and brought awareness to Taylor's story. The Congressional Black Caucus led Democratic Caucus members in wearing red "Recy" pins while attending the 2018 State of the Union, where Taylor's granddaughter, Mary Joyce Owens, was a guest.
Early life
Recy Corbitt was born on December 31, 1919 in rural Alabama, where her family were farmworkers doing sharecropping. At 17, her mother died and she cared for her six siblings. She continued to work in sharecropping and by the time she was 24 in 1944, she had married Willie Guy Taylor and they had a young daughter, Joyce Lee.
First grand jury
Parks took the case back to Montgomery where she started to form support for Taylor with the assistance of E.D. Nixon, Rufas A. Lewis, and E.G. Jackson, all influential men in the Montgomery community. Parks and her allies formed the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Taylor, "with support from national labor unions, African-American organizations, and women's groups." The group recruited supporters across the entire country and by the spring of 1945 they had organized what the Chicago Defender called the "strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade."
The grand jury hearing took place on October 3–4, 1944, with an all-white, all-male jury. However, none of the assailants had been arrested, which meant that the only witnesses were Taylor's black friends and family. Taylor's family could not identify the names of the assailants, and since Sheriff Gamble "never arranged a police line-up, Taylor could not identify her attackers in court". Also, the $250 bond Gamble placed Wilson and his accomplices under "were issued late in the afternoon, the day after Taylor's hearing". After five minutes of deliberation, the jury dismissed the case. The only way it could be re-opened would be through an indictment from a second grand jury.
Death
Taylor died in her sleep at a nursing home at the age of 97 in Abbeville, Alabama, on December 28, 2017, just three days before her 98th birthday. She was buried next to her daughter's grave at New Mount Zion Freewill Baptist Church.
