Hi, I’m Jackie Strohm, the Prevention & Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Welcome to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast.

To celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly Black women, we are sharing a series of shorter episodes so you can learn all about the people and events that contributed to our movement

During today’s episode we’re going to highlight two incredible Black women - one who you may have never heard of, and another who is popular for reasons other than the role they played in the anti-sexual violence movement.

As a warning, this episode contains descriptions of racial and sexual violence. Please take care of yourself while listening.

On September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a Black woman living in rural Alabama, was walking home from church with her friend and her son, when a car pulled up behind them on the road. There were seven armed white men, including US Army Private Herbert Lovett, who accused Taylor of cutting a white boy named Tommy Clarson. This accusation was not true, as Taylor had been with her friend all day. 

The men forced Taylor into the car at gunpoint and drove her to a patch of trees on the side of the road. They forced her to remove her clothes as she begged to return home to her husband and infant child. Lovett ordered Taylor to lie down and threatened to kill her if she didn’t cooperate. Six of the men, including Lovett, raped her.

Taylor’s friend, who was able to identify the car and the driver as Hugo Wilson, and  reported the kidnapping to the police. Wilson admitted to driving the car, but pinned the rape on the other six men. There were three eyewitnesses who identified Wilson as the driver, but the police did not question any of the other men Wilson had named, and instead gave Wilson a fine.

The local community was outraged by the actions of the police, and it was reported to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP sent their best investigator of sexual assaults on Black women - Rosa Parks. 

When most of us think about Rosa Parks we think of her as a civil rights icon, best known for sparking the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. But she joined the NAACP in 1943, 12 years before the bus boycotts.

In her first years at the NAACP, Parks worked specifically on criminal justice and its application in Alabama communities. One part of her work was protecting Black men from false accusations and lynchings; the other was ensuring that Black people who had been sexually assaulted by white people could get their day in court. This particular issue was close to Parks’ heart as in 1931, when she was 18, a white male neighbor had assaulted and attempted to rape her. Parks resisted and later said of the incident, “I was ready to die but give my consent never. Never, never.” 

A grand jury hearing for Recy Taylor’s case took place in October 1944 with an all-white, all-male jury. Because none of the assailants had been arrested, and Taylor’s friends and family could not identify the names of the assailants, and there was never a police line-up, Taylor could not identify her attackers in court. After just five minutes of deliberation, the jury dismissed the case.

In the months following the trial, Taylor received multiple death threats and her house was firebombed. To bring attention to Taylor’s case, Parks founded the “Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor.”  Talk about Taylor’s case spread through NAACP chapters, and these organizations and others came together to defend Taylor, and demand safety for Taylor and punishment for her attackers. She had the support of W.E.B Dubois, Mary Church Terrell, and many influential men in the Montgomery community. By the spring of 1945, they had organized a group of supporters across the entire country.

Another investigation took place, and one of the assailants, Joe Culpepper, admitted that Taylor had been kidnapped at gunpoint and raped, which supported Taylor’s original account. A second all-white, all-male grand jury refused to issue any indictments.

While no justice was brought through the criminal justice system, the case was considered a major victory for the civil rights movement due to the successful mobilization efforts of activists across the country.

Five years after the rape of Recy Taylor in 1949, Parks used the same tactics to mobilize support for Gertrude Perkins, a Black woman who was abducted and raped by two white police officers in Montgomery, Alabama. Although protests brought public attention to the case and triggered a trial, the all-white, all-male grand jury refused to indict the two men. 

In 1952 Parks worked unsuccessfully to free Jeremiah Reeves, a Black teenager who was sentenced to the death penalty for allegedly raping a white woman. Certain that Reeves had been wrongly accused and that the relationship had been consensual, Parks and the Montgomery NAACP appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, Alabama officials executed Reeves in 1957.

In 1954, the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama, threatened a bus boycott after dozens of Black women spoke out. Working-class Black women, who made up 90% of passengers, were regularly targeted by white bus drivers with sexualized and racialized insults and abuse. Rosa Parks, like thousands of other Black women fed up with this mistreatment on buses, resisted.

While credit often goes to Parks for the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, nine months before, 15 year old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white person. On March 2, 1955, she was the first person arrested for challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation policies.

So why have many people never heard of Colvin? The NAACP and other Black organizations felt Rosa Parks would be a good icon because she had the right look - she was an adult, was lighter-skinned, and not pregnant; shortly after Colvin’s arrest, she became pregnant. In an interview, Colvin said “They said they didn’t want to use a pregnant teenager because it would be controversial and the people would talk about the pregnancy more than the boycott.”
Colvin and four other women were plaintiffs in Browder vs. Gayle, the court case that successfully overturned the bus segregation laws in Alabama.

Nearly 60 years after the case, in 2011, the state of Alabama issued a formal apology for Recy Taylor’s treatment by the state’s legal system. In 2017, a documentary by  Nancy Buirski, The Rape of Recy Taylor, premiered. The award-winning film focuses on Taylor and her family recounting their struggle for justice, and seeks to expose a context of systemic racism that fostered the crime and coverup. 

Taylor died three weeks after the film’s release at the age of 97. In her 2018 Golden Globes speech, Oprah Winfrey spoke of Taylor, saying “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I’m especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories.” She continued, “Recy Taylor lived as we all have lived - too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. And for too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared speak their truth to the power of those men. But their time is up… I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on.”

Thanks for listening to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To learn more about Recy Taylor and Rosa Parks, check out the resources shared in the episode description. To learn more about the history of the anti-sexual violence movement, check out PCAR’s free History and Philosphy eLearning course at campus.nsvrc.org.