Recy Taylor was raped on September 3, 1944 by six white men. Taylor born on December 31, 1919 was a sharecropper who grew up in Abbeville, Alabama.

On September 3, 1944,  Taylor was walking home from Rock Hill Holiness Church with a friend and her son. During the two-mile walk the pair, was stopped by men in a green Chevrolet truck. The men forced Taylor and her friend was forced into the car at gunpoint, blindfolded, and drove her to the middle of a forest, where each raped her. After the rape, they brought Taylor to the edge of town left her there. After her father found her, the women both went to Three Points police station where Taylor told Sheriff George H. Gamble what happened.

After describing the car, the sheriff was able to locate its owner, Hugo Wilson. Wilson was taken into the sheriff’s office, and Taylor identified him as one of her attackers. Wilson named the other men involved,  however, Wilson said there had been no rape because they paid Taylor for sex. Wilson was never arrested. To intimidate Taylor, her house was firebombed, forcing her family to move in with her father and siblings. The rape left Taylor unable to have additional children. She and her husband eventually separated in the 1960s, shortly before his death. Taylor continued sharecropping in Abbeville until she moved to Florida in the 1965. Her only child, Joyce, died in a car accident in 1967.

Although Taylor failed to get justice in 1944 and 1945, her courage in speaking out against her rapists encouraged other black women who had been sexually abused to report the incidents, and her actions helped inspire others in Alabama and across the South to speak out against racial discrimination. In 2011, the Alabama legislature passed a resolution giving Recy Taylor an official apology.
Recy Taylor died on December 28, 2017, in Abbeville, Alabama at the age of 97.

Sources:

Gillmer, S. (2018, July 26). Recy Taylor (1919-2017). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/taylor-recy-1919-2017/

Wynne Davis, “How Recy Taylor Spoke Out Against Her Rape, Decades Before #MeToo”, National Public Radio, Inc., January 8, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/01/08/576566358/how-recy-taylor-spoke-out-against-her-rape-decades-before-metoo