More on the Rape of Black Women

This blog is a continuation of my previous blog about the book At The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance.  The following quotations come from the Epilogue by Danielle L. McGuire.

According to historian McGuire, Recy Taylor who was gang raped in 1944 was a key but largely unknown figure in the civil rights movement.

"Recy Taylor turned eighty-nine on December 31, 2008.  I met her and her youngest brother [Robert Corbitt] at his tidy ranch house just down the street from the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama.  We came together on the same day that one million Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., to witness the inauguration of the country's first black president.  I talked with the slight, spry woman whose courage and testimony in 1994 helped inspire the modern civil rights movement. . . . as William Faulkner put it, that 'the past is never dead, it isn't even past.'"

"This seems especially true in Abbeville, where Taylor's family and the families of her assailants have lived side by side for decades. . . . Corbitt, a lean man with a warm smile, said, 'You'd be surprised at how close they lived.  We were very segregated---but we were neighbors.  It's just that we were in the gray houses and they were in the nicer houses.'"

"For the Corbitt family, those county roads and old homes surrounding Abbeville will always be crime scenes---there has been no resolution or reconciliation, no justice.  The violence resonates through generations. . . . Not surprisingly, most whites denied it ever happened [the gang rape], while blacks remembered it well."

"Recy had a hard life," Robert said.  "When our mother died, everyone fell in her hands.  She had to take care of all the children. . . . She is still 'very hurt', [PTSD].  I didn't realize the effect rape took on people until it happened to my sister."

"I never had nothin,' Taylor recalled, 'I still don't have nothin.'"


From Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home:  Birmingham, Alabama, and the Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution:

"Just when we thought there couldn't be anything left to uncover about the civil rights movement, Danielle L. McGuire finds a new facet of that endlessly prismatic struggle at the core of our national identity.  By reinterpreting black liberation through the lens of organized resistance of white male sexual aggression against African-American women, McGuire ingeniously upends the white race's ultimate rationale for its violent subjugation of blacks---imputed [supposed] black male sexual aggression against white women.  It is an original premise, and At the Dark End of the Street delivers on it with scholarly authority and narrative polish."

From Nell Irvin Painter, author of of The History of White People:

"This book is as essential as its history is infuriating."