Oprah Winfrey’s barnstormer of a
speech at the Golden Globes highlighted the story of
a black Alabama woman who was raped by six white men
in 1944.
Winfrey, in speaking of the
victims of sexual assault whose voices might never
be heard, told the audience that Recy Taylor was a
name they should know.
Taylor,
a 24-year-old African-American sharecropper, was
walking home from church in Abbeville, Ala., on
the night of Sept. 3, 1944, when she was
abducted and raped by six white men.
The
crime was extensively covered in the Black press
and an early catalyst for the civil rights
movement. The N.A.A.C.P. sent a young activist
from its Montgomery, Ala., chapter named Rosa
Parks to investigate. African-Americans
around the country demanded that the men be
prosecuted.
But
the attack, like many involving black victims
during the Jim Crow era in the South, never went
to trial. Two all-white, all-male grand juries
refused to indict the men, even though one of
them had confessed.
Decades
passed before the case gained renewed attention,
with the publication in 2010 of “At the Dark
End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and
Resistance — a New History of the Civil Rights
Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black
Power,” by the historianDanielle
L. McGuire. The book prompted an official
apology in 2011 to Mrs. Taylor by the Alabama
Legislature, which called the failure to
prosecute her attackers “morally abhorrent and
repugnant.”
Mrs.
Taylor died in Abbeville on Thursday, three
weeks after the release of “The Rape of Recy
Taylor,” a documentary about
the crime. She was 97. The death was confirmed
by her brother, Robert Lee Corbitt.
“Many
ladies got raped,” Mrs. Taylor said in the
film, interviewed by its director, Nancy Buirski.
“The peoples there — they seemed like they
wasn’t concerned about what happened to me,
and they didn’t try and do nothing about it. I
can’t help but tell the truth of what they
done to me.”
Born
on Dec. 31, 1919, to a family of sharecroppers
in Abbeville, in southeastern Alabama, Recy
(pronounced “REE-see”) Corbitt found herself
caring for six younger siblings after their
mother died when she was 17.
On
the night of the attack, she had gone to Rock
Hill Holiness Church for a Pentecostal service
of singing and praying and was walking home
along a country highway bounded by peanut farms.
A friend, Fannie Daniel, 61, and Ms. Daniel’s
18-year-old son, West, were with her. They
noticed a green Chevrolet passing by several
times.
Eventually
the car stopped, and seven young white men,
armed with guns and knives, stepped out. One of
them, Herbert Lovett, the oldest in the group,
ordered the three to halt, and then pointed a
shotgun at them when they ignored him.
The
men forced Mrs. Taylor into the car at gunpoint
and drove her to a grove of pine trees on the
side of the road, where they forced her to
disrobe. She begged to be allowed to go, citing
her husband and their 3-year-old daughter. But
Mr. Lovett was unmoved. Ordering her to “act
just like you do with your husband or I’ll cut
your damn throat,” he and five other men raped
her. (A seventh young man, Billy Howerton, said
later that he did not take part because he knew
Mrs. Taylor.)
Dumped
out of the car, Mrs. Taylor removed her
blindfold and stumbled toward safety. Her
father, Benny Corbitt, had learned of the
abduction and gone searching for her. Soon the
county sheriff, George H. Gamble, arrived.
Mrs.
Taylor told Sheriff Gamble that she could not
identify her assailants, but her description of
the car matched only one vehicle in the county,
that of Hugo Wilson. When the sheriff returned
with Mr. Wilson and his father, Mrs. Taylor
identified Mr. Wilson as one of her attackers,
as did the teenage friend.
Questioned
at the county jail, Mr. Wilson acknowledged that
he and five others — Mr. Lovett, Dillard York,
Luther Lee, Willie Joe Culpepper and Robert
Gamble — “all had intercourse with her,”
but insisted that they had paid her and that it
was not rape. The sheriff sent Mr. Wilson home.
The
next evening, Mrs. Taylor faced new threats:
White vigilantes set her porch on fire. The
following day, she and her husband, Willie Guy
Taylor, and their daughter, Joyce Lee, moved in
with her father and siblings. Mr. Corbitt, her
father, would sleep in a chinaberry tree in the
backyard, watching over the family while
cradling a double-barreled shotgun, going inside
to sleep only after the sun rose.
Mrs.
Taylor in a 1944 photograph.Credit:Tamiment
Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
As
word of the crime spread through Alabama’s
black community the N.A.A.C.P.’s Montgomery
chapter sent Mrs. Parks, who had spent much of
her childhood in Abbeville, to interview Mrs.
Taylor.
The
deputy sheriff, Lewey Corbitt (not a close
relation), was not happy about Mrs. Parks’s
presence. He drove past the house repeatedly and
then forcibly ejected her. “I don’t want any
troublemakers here in Abbeville,” he warned
her. “If you don’t go, I’ll lock you
up.”
Mindful
of the outrage surrounding the case of the Scottsboro
Boys — nine black teenagers who had
been wrongly accused of raping two white women
in 1931 — the county prosecutor took care to
provide a semblance of equal justice. But it was
an empty gesture.
When
the grand jury met on Oct. 3 and 4, 1944, Mrs.
Taylor’s loved ones were the only witnesses.
None of the men had been arrested, and there had
not been a police lineup, so Mrs. Taylor could
not identify her attackers.
The
grand jury declined to indict the men. Word
spread through union halls, churches,
barbershops, pool halls and, significantly,
through the black press. “Alabama Whites
Attack Woman; Not Punished,” declared a
headline in The Pittsburgh Courier, an
African-American newspaper.
It
was the final year of World War II, and some
blacks likened their struggle for equal rights
to the fight against fascism. Eugene
Gordon, a black writer for The Daily Worker,
a Communist newspaper in New York, interviewed
Mrs. Taylor and told his readers, “The raping
of Mrs. Recy Taylor was a fascist-like brutal
violation of her personal rights as a woman and
as a citizen of democracy.”
At
an emergency meeting in the Hotel Theresa in
Harlem on Nov. 25, 1944, the Committee for Equal
Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, which Mrs. Parks
had helped organize, became a national
organization. It spearheaded a campaign of
letters, petitions and postcards urging Gov. Chauncey
Sparksto investigate.
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Former Sheriff David Clarke to face
trial for his threats
David
Clarke crossed a line and must now appear for a
trial on Jan. 22 after posting threatening Facebook messages
directed at a man he encountered last year at an airport,
the Huffington
Post reported.
Clarke’s posts could “reasonably be
understood as a threat, coercion, or intimidation that
punishment … will immediately follow,” U.S. District
Judge J.P. Stadtmueller ruled on Friday while
dismissing most of Daniel Black’s civil rights
lawsuit.
Here’s the backstory. The two men were
on the same flight to Milwaukee. Black asked the sheriff if
he was David Clarke. He nodded yes, and Black shook his head
disparagingly and walked away. Clarke felt disrespected and
asked six of his deputies to have a talk with Black after
the plane landed. Black posted on social media about the
incident and filed a complaint with county officials before
filing a lawsuit. It alleged that Clarke violated his Fourth
Amendment right (unreasonable seizure by the deputies) in
retaliation for exercising his First Amendment right (the
free speech of shaking his head at the sheriff) and deprived
him of due process under the 14th Amendment. The judge threw
out most of Black’s lawsuit, noting in part that being
questioned by the deputies may have been unpleasant but
wasn’t really a seizure.
Clarke, however, may have crossed a line
when he posted threatening message against Black, which
could constitute intimidation, the judge said. The former
sheriff wrote this in one of the posts: “Cheer up,
snowflake … if Sheriff Clarke were to really harass you,
you wouldn’t be around to whine about it.” Another post
said that if anyone “pulls this stunt on a plane they may
get knocked out.” Those threats could have violated
Black’s free speech rights. It will be up to a jury to
decide.
Marijuana legalization must address
price paid by Black bodies
Thirty-six-year-old Ingrid Archie
recounted the path to her 2004 conviction on marijuana
possession charges. “I grew up in foster care, and that is
how I learned to sell drugs and basically fend for myself as
a teenager,” acknowledged Archie, an African-American who
came of age in South Los Angeles and has been incarcerated
several times on drug-related charges, including possession
and sales. “Somebody was staying at my house and using my
address as their location and their parole officer came and
found their stuff,” said Archie, who was already on
probation for selling cocaine. “I got charged with it
[marijuana] because it was in my house.”
Over the past decade, Archie has struggled
yet succeeded in forging a different path. Now a legal
clinic coordinator with A New Way of Life, a Los Angeles
nonprofit reentry program serving formerly incarcerated
women, Archie conducts numerous civic engagement functions
including voter education and community awareness around
criminal justice issues. However, she clarified how her 2004
marijuana conviction worked against her discovering her own
new way of life. Although initially able to find a job
post-conviction, she was less fortunate once she lost that
position. “I was laid off in 2009 and was unable to get
another job until 2015,” said Archie, stressing the impact
of the marijuana charge on her record and how it led to
additional legal and financial problems. “I lost my
apartment and, basically, my whole livelihood diminished
because of that.”
Many are aware that Archie’s home state
of California recently rang in the New Year with the
implementation of its statewide legalization of recreational
marijuana use allowing adults of at least 21 to purchase
marijuana from a licensed dispensary. Yet most are less
aware of a provision of Proposition 64, the November 2016
state ballot initiative that legalized recreational
marijuana, enabling individuals like Archie with pot-related
convictions to apply to get them reduced or dismissed.
Unlike the New Year’s enactment of recreational use, this
resentencing provision — a marijuana-specific version of
its more general predecessor, Prop 47 — has been in effect
for the past year. Under it, those who apply can have
marijuana-related charges on their records reduced or
dismissed, and those incarcerated can be released from
prison. This is particularly encouraging for
African-Americans, given the ACLU reported they
are almost four times more likely to be arrested for
possession of marijuana than white people, despite similar
rates of drug use.
In the law’s first year, over 2,660
applications were filed to
reduce sentences for people convicted of marijuana-related
offenses and an additional 1,500 were submitted to
reclassify old felony marijuana convictions as misdemeanors
or expunge them altogether. California’s Judicial Council,
which records such application data, doesn’t document the
outcomes of these requests.
Still, for Archie, the impact is clear.
“On the night that Prop 64 passed, I was the first person
in the state of California to have my felony conviction go
from a felony to a misdemeanor,” she revealed, recalling
the proposition’s passage “on the same night Trump got
elected.” Archie described how her clinic currently
services an average of 60 people each month, mostly
African-American and Latina, who come to their doors looking
to get their convictions cleared. “A lot of people with
crimes expunged from their records have been able to get
jobs, to get housing, and live functional lives they were
unable to before,” she reported.
Along with housing and other reentry
services, explained Archie, A New Way of Life offers an
expungement clinic twice a month in Long Beach and in Watts
for people in the community who have records and “are
trying to get jobs.” Flyers are distributed to community
organizations and locations where “people with felonies
would frequent and, once they call in, we ask them
qualifying questions, see which clinic is more convenient
for them, and let them know everything is free of charge,”
said Archie. These clients then sit down with a clinic
lawyer and file a petition for expungement with the court,
which takes about six to eight weeks to respond. Once that
takes place, continued Archie, “the lawyer will call you
and let you know your record has been expunged and that you
don’t have to take any further action, or we have to go
back to court to do a little more fighting to get this off
of your record.”
While 29 states have legalized medical
marijuana, eight states, including California, in addition
to Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and Guam, have acted to
legalize recreational marijuana. A few of those eight,
including Oregon, which preceded California in legislating
recreational use, also allow for the reduction or
expungement of possession convictions under certain
conditions. Despite this state-level progress, Attorney
General Jeff Sessions has long voiced his opposition to
cannabis and has drafted inflexible sentencing
guidelines urging federal prosecutors nationally to pursue
harsh sentences for drug offenses, no matter how minor.
“Previous nationwide guidance specific to marijuana
enforcement is unnecessary and is rescinded, effective
immediately,” a January 4 Justice
Department memo read. In it, Sessions rolls back an
Obama-era policy that deprioritized prosecution of
marijuana-related cases and gave states room for
recreational use.
Sessions’ new heavy-handed direction
could bring federal law enforcement into conflict with state
authorities over marijuana policy, since the feds and the
states appear to be moving in opposite directions. Some have
already warned Sessions they are up for the fight.
“We’ll give Jeff Sessions our legal pot when he pries it
from our warm, extremely interesting to look at hands,”
tweeted Democrats in Colorado’s State Senate in response to
the Jan. 4 memo. However, such a fight is by no means an
easy win for the feds.
“The truth is, states never needed the
permission of the federal government to legalize marijuana
under state law,” said Tamar Todd, a senior director of
legal affairs at Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for a
regulation of drugs “grounded in science, compassion,
health and human rights.” Todd explained that under the
Tenth Amendment, states “have the authority
constitutionally to set their own state laws and the federal
government can’t force the states to criminalize anything
under state law, and also can’t force the states to
enforce their law.” So, continued Todd, “the federal
government has to go at it alone, and the reality is that
over 90 percent of all drug law enforcement happens at the
state and local level.”
At that state level, Todd believes
that California represents the “new gold standard
of legalization” in criminal sentencing reform,
and that such reform should accompany any
legalization processes given the life-altering
consequences and hefty price many of those convicted
continue to pay.
“We no longer can just look at
ending prohibition and adopting a better approach,
but we now actually have to look back at undoing the
harm that prohibition caused,” said Todd, noting
that the “racial discrimination carried out in the
enforcement of marijuana laws” carries with it the
weight and “collateral consequences of those
convictions, and continues to, throughout the course
of people’s lives.”
Given California has invested much
time, money and thought into its current remedial
process and the lives it impacts, Archie ultimately
feels the federal thwarting of the decriminalization
of a natural substance that most feel should be
medicinally and casually accessible truly represents
a backward approach.
“If a person already has that
felony conviction on their record, that person is
more likely to recidivate back in to the same
situation that they came from,” stressed Archie,
pointing out how hard it is “for a person to get
anywhere after they are released from incarceration.
In order to counteract that, we need programs where
people can get certain felonies wiped off of their
records so that they can move forward, back into
society, provide for their families, and not have to
go back to jail.”
Former HCC trustee sentenced to 70
months in prison for taking bribes
Former Houston Community College trustee
Chris Oliver will spend nearly six years in federal prison
for taking bribes in his position as a trustee.
A federal judge sentenced Oliver Monday to
70 months in prison, followed by a year of supervised
release.
“What’s going on at HCC?” asked
judge Vanessa Gilmore, asking if the college was “just a
cesspool.”
Oliver was accused of taking nearly
$90,000 in bribes to influence his service as an HCC
trustee, according to court records. Some of that came in
the form of Visa gift cards, the records said. Oliver
pleaded guilty to only one of two counts on which he was
indicted. In that count, federal prosecutors allege he
accepted $12,000 in bribes. That came from former Houston
Public Works director Karun Sreerama, who was dismissed from
his post after the case came to light.
Sreerama insists he was cooperating with
the FBI at the time.
In court Monday, Gilmore detailed at least
three other people were involved in bribing Oliver for
nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
Oliver said in court that over time, the
temptations became too much and he eventually gave in,
adding he should’ve called it quits in 2011.
Outside court, when asked if he felt
remorse or was sorry, Oliver’s attorney said he had no
comment.
GOP lawyer who defended New Jim Crow
voting laws may become federal judge
A Republican attorney who argued for the
legalization of Jim Crow-like voter suppression laws may now
become federal judge.
In July of 2013, North Carolina enacted a
set of voter suppression laws that the Fourth Circuit
Court of Appeals later struck down for targeting
“African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
In addition to requiring certain
government-issued photo ID’s, the law shortened the early
voting period and got rid of same-day voter
registration, out-of-precinct voting, and pre-registration
for high school students.
When the law went to court, North Carolina
sent Republican lawyer Thomas
Farr to defend it against the NAACP’s
lawsuit.
While the NAACP insisted that the
“monster” laws intentionally discriminated against
African-Americans, Farr vehemently denied that was the case.
“It was not a nefarious thing,” he
insisted during a June 2016 hearing.
But the court disagreed, striking down the
law and accusing the legislature of researching the most
likely voting methods for African-Americans so that they
could specifically target those methods in their law.
The judges said that evidence was “as
close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern
times” and called the law “the most restrictive
voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim
Crow.”
Farr tried to appeal to the Supreme Court,
but the Court declined to hear the case.
Trump’s appointee
But now, Farr could be a federal
judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
Trump nominated Farr for the position in
July, and on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee
is set to vote on the appointment.
Already, civil rights groups are
mobilizing against the appointment, and the Congressional
Black Caucus wrote to the senators to tell them that
Farr’s record “puts him at the forefront of an extended
fight to disenfranchise African-American voters in his home
state of North Carolina.”
Farr’s nomination is just another
example of Trump’s attempts to reshape the judicial branch
with a high number of appointees, many of them far-right.
Stars wear all black at Golden
Globes in show of solidarity
Everyone from Nick Jonas to Meryl Streep
was sporting black at Sunday night’s award show as a
symbol of protest against sexual harassment and assault in
Hollywood. Claire Foy wore a sleek, all-black suit,
and Justin Timberlake looked dapper in a silk-trimmed
black suit. Other all-black-clad celebrities included
Tracee Ellis Ross, Emma Watson, Hugh Jackman, Jessica
Chastain, Octavia Spencer and Kerry Washington.
“The question isn’t who are you
wearing tonight, it’s why are you wearing black?” E!
News co-host Giuliana Rancic said on the red carpet.
The powerful act of solidarity comes in
the wake of the #MeToo
movement in which millions
of people around the world shared their stories
of sexual harassment and assault. The movement inspired a
cultural reckoning that has brought down many alleged
predators in power including Harvey
Weinstein, Kevin
Spacey and Matt
Lauer.
Actress Michelle Williams wore black and
brought activist and #MeToo
creator Tarana Burke as her red carpet guest.
“This moment is so powerful because
we’re staring at a… collaboration between these two
worlds that people don’t usually put together and would
most likely have us pinned against each other,” Burke
told E! co-host Ryan Seacrest. “It’s really powerful
to be on the red carpet tonight.”
Williams added how powerful this moment
is for her as a woman and a mother.
“I thought that I would have to raise
my daughter to learn how to protect herself in a dangerous
world and I think because of the work that Tarana has done
and the work that I’m learning how to do we actually
have the opportunity to hand our children a different
world,” she said.
Another accessory commonly spotted on
this year’s red carpet were tiny
pins that read “Time’s Up.” The small black
and white pins are part of the recent initiative
of the same name spearheaded by more than 300
actresses to combat sexual violence in Hollywood.
Stars including Seth Meyers, Hugh
Jackman, James Franco and Bob Odenkirk donned Time’s Up
pins on the red carpet.
The Time’s Up initiative was announced
on New Year’s Day and was inspired by the
recent #MeToo
movement as well. One way the initiative is
hoping to combat sexual misconduct is through a newly
created legal defense fund that will help less-privileged
women come forward with their stories.
“This is not about Hollywood,”
actress Debra Messing said on the red carpet. “This is
about every woman in every industry, globally.”
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