The Rape of Recy Taylor , (The Public is Invited) Whitney Humanities Center-Sat Jan 20th, 2018

Saturday, January 20

The Rape of Recy Taylor, Director Nancy Buirski

Annual Celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
(USA, 2017) 91 min.
Followed by a Q&A with the director and Crystal Feimster, producer
(African American Studies; African American Cultural Center; American Studies; Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Migration; Film and Media Studies; History; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Films at the Whitney, supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale)

3:00pm, Auditorium

Whitney Center for the Humanities-Directions

Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists. The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice.  

Our film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story. An attempted rape against Parks was but one inspiration for her ongoing work to find justice for countless women like Taylor. The 1955 bus boycott was an end result, not a beginning.  

More and more women are now speaking up after rape. Our film tells the story of black women who spoke up when danger was greatest; it was their noble efforts to take back their bodies that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and movements that followed. The 2017 Global March by Women is linked to their courage. From sexual aggression on ‘40s southern streets to today’s college campuses and to the threatened right to choose, it is control of women’s bodies that powered the movement in Recy Taylor’s day and fuels our outrage today.