{"id":395211,"date":"2019-02-05T10:51:14","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T09:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/from-slavery-onward-a-black-womans-body-was-never-hers-alone\/"},"modified":"2019-02-05T10:51:14","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T09:51:14","slug":"from-slavery-onward-a-black-womans-body-was-never-hers-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/from-slavery-onward-a-black-womans-body-was-never-hers-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"From Slavery Onward, A Black Woman\u2019s Body Was Never Hers Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Recy Taylor with her daughter and husband<\/em><\/p>\n

To mark the start of the ever-questionable<\/a> Black History Month and what would have been the 106th birthday of the ever-iconic<\/a> Rosa Parks – “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in” – we pay tribute to Recy Taylor, the 24-year-old black mother abducted and gang raped in 1944 Alabama by six white boys, and to all the other unnamed, unheard black women likewise victimized by what was long a “weapon of terror<\/a>” wielded by white men in the Jim Crow South. Taylor was walking home from church in the small town of Abbeville when she was kidnapped, blindfolded and raped at gunpoint; begging for her life, she promised to stay silent so she could return to her husband and nine-month-old daughter. But she spoke up. Though she and her family were harassed and the boys were never brought to justice, Taylor’s rape became the focus of a high-profile\u00a0 N.A.A.C.P. campaign led by a tough women’s rights advocate – Rosa Parks. It also became a galvanizing moment for a civil rights movement that took far too long to acknowledge a key, enduring injustice<\/a>: In an America rooted in slavery, charged activist Fannie Lou Hamer, \u201cA black woman\u2019s body was never hers alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taylor’s harrowing story has been told in the book<\/a>, “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance,” and in the film, <\/a>“The Rape of Recy Taylor.” Both determinedly place her story in the broader context of the brutal history of sexual violence<\/a> against black women, part of what Ida Wells, fiery 1890s anti-lynching activist and editor called a post-slavery \u201csystem of intimidation\u201d designed to keep them \u201csubservient and submissive.\u201d Unlike lynchings of black men, there was little visual record of rapes of black women; still, they were so common, wrote activist Anna Julia Cooper, \u201cOnly the black woman can say, \u2018When and where I enter, then and there the whole (race) enters with me.\u2019” Taylor helped break the silence around those crimes; today, black women still toil to reclaim their bodies, stories, humanity. In 2011, the state of Alabama finally issued <\/a>an apology, offering Taylor their “deepest sympathies and solemn regrets” for the failure to indict her attackers – a failure one Democratic lawmaker deemed <\/a>“morally abhorrent.” Taylor was then 91; she died <\/a>at 97, having earlier visited the Obama White House. To those seeking to retell her story, she explained speaking up <\/a>long ago in stark, steadfast terms: “I had to say what they did to me.”<\/p>\n

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Taylor. Photo by Al.com<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n