Soon the county sheriff, George H Gamble, arrived. Her father, Benny Corbitt, had learned of the abduction and gone searching for her. (A seventh young man, Billy Howerton, said later that he did not take part because he knew Taylor.)ĭumped out of the car, Taylor removed her blindfold and stumbled toward safety.
Ordering her to "act just like you do with your husband or I'll cut your damn throat," he and five other men raped her. She begged to be allowed to go, citing her husband and their three-year-old daughter. The men forced Taylor into the car at gunpoint and drove her to a grove of pine trees on the side of the road, where they forced her to disrobe. One of them, Herbert Lovett, the oldest in the group, ordered the three to halt, and then pointed a shotgun at them when they ignored him. They noticed a green Chevrolet passing by several times.Įventually the car stopped, and seven young white men, armed with guns and knives, stepped out. A friend, Fannie Daniel (61), and Daniel's 18-year-old son West, were with her. On the night of the attack, she had gone to Rock Hill Holiness Church for a Pentecostal service of singing and praying and was walking home along a country highway bounded by peanut farms. The book prompted an official apology in 2011 to Taylor by the Alabama legislature, which called the failure to prosecute her attackers "morally abhorrent and repugnant".īorn on December 31st, 1919, to a family of sharecroppers in Abbeville, in southeastern Alabama, Recy (pronounced “REE-see”) Corbitt found herself caring for six younger siblings after their mother died when she was 17. Two all-white, all-male grand juries refused to indict the men, even though one of them had confessed.ĭecades passed before the case gained renewed attention, with the publication in 2010 of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, by historian Danielle L McGuire. African-Americans around the country demanded that the men be prosecuted.īut the attack, like many involving black victims during the Jim Crow era in the South, never went to trial. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent a young activist from its Montgomery, Alabama, chapter named Rosa Parks to investigate. The crime was extensively covered in the black press and an early catalyst for the civil rights movement. Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old African-American sharecropper, was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, on the night of September 3rd, 1944, when she was abducted and raped by six white men.
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