Recy Taylor

Case background and investigation

Recy Taylor was born on December 31, 1919, and in 1944 was a 24-year-old married mother working as a sharecropper in Henry County, Alabama. On the evening of September 3, 1944, she was walking home from a church service in Abbeville when a car carrying seven armed white men stopped beside her. According to the National Women's History Museum, she was forced into the car at gunpoint, driven to a wooded area and raped by six of the men. She was then left blindfolded at the side of a road and threatened with death if she spoke about what had happened.

Taylor reported the assault. The men in the car were identified to the authorities, and published accounts state that at least one of them admitted what had taken place. No arrests followed. NBC News reported that an attempt was also made to pay Taylor to stay silent.

The Montgomery branch of the NAACP sent Rosa Parks, then an investigator for the organization, to Abbeville to interview Taylor. Parks and other activists formed the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, which drew national attention to the case and pressed the governor of Alabama, Chauncey Sparks, to act.

An all-white, all-male Henry County grand jury heard the case on October 3 and 4, 1944, and declined to indict after about five minutes of deliberation. Following the public campaign, the state opened a further investigation, and a second grand jury considered the matter on February 14, 1945. It also refused to return indictments, even though, according to the National Women's History Museum, additional men had by then made admissions to investigators. No one was ever prosecuted, and none of the men was ever convicted of any offense in connection with the attack.

The case received renewed attention after historian Danielle McGuire published a book that documented it in detail. In 2011 the mayor of Abbeville and county officials apologized, and on April 21, 2011, the Alabama Legislature adopted a resolution apologizing to Taylor for the state's failure to prosecute, calling that failure morally abhorrent and repugnant.

A documentary film about her experience was released in December 2017. Recy Taylor died in a nursing home in Abbeville on December 28, 2017, three days before her 98th birthday.