Nancy Buirski (2017)
On 3 September 1944, Recy Corbitt Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old African-American woman, was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama with a female friend and the latter’s teenage son. A car pulled up alongside them. Its occupants, seven white male teenagers, forced Taylor at gunpoint into the car and drove to a clearing in woodland beside the road, where they made her undress and gang-raped her. It was unusual in the Jim Crow southern states for a black woman to report a sexual assault but Taylor went to the police. In the course of the following year, an Alabama court twice heard the case. Between the two hearings, Taylor’s family was subjected to various intimidation and her home firebombed by white supremacists. With her husband and young daughter, Recy went to live with her father and younger siblings elsewhere in the town. Benny Corbitt spent night after night in a tree outside the house, armed with a gun, to protect his family. At the time of the first hearing, the alleged assailants had not even been arrested and the all-white, all-male jury took five minutes to dismiss the case. The second trial took place in light of an investigation ordered by the Alabama state governor; this included interviews, yielding contradictory evidence, from the seven youths concerned. A second all-white, all-male jury declined to issue indictments.
Rosa Parks, a leading civil rights activist long before the Montgomery bus boycott that began in December 1955, played an important role in drawing public attention to this miscarriage of justice. Parks was instrumental in setting up a ‘Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs Recy Taylor’: the campaign generated widespread press coverage and gathered support in various parts of the US but, from the victim’s point of view, yielded no concrete results. The situation didn’t change until the appearance more than half a century later of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance[1] by Danielle L McGuire, a (white) historian of racial and sexual violence. The publication of McGuire’s book in 2011 quickly led to formal apologies to Taylor from the Alabama legislature for its historic ‘failure to prosecute her attackers’. On 28 December 2017, Recy Taylor, three days short of her ninety-eighth birthday, died in an Abbeville nursing home. The documentary feature The Rape of Recy Taylor, written and directed by Nancy Buirski (who also is white), is inspired by McGuire’s book. The film was shown in Venice and at the New York Film Festival in 2017 and opened in the US two weeks before its subject’s death. The internationally released version carries a closing dedication to the memory of Taylor and her younger sister Alma Daniels, who predeceased her in 2016.
The film isn’t as clear as it might be in setting out the now largely undisputed facts of the crime. This is partly because it takes a little while to adjust to the speech of the two main talking heads, Alma Daniels and her and Recy’s brother Robert Corbitt, who supply most of the information about what happened on the night of the rape. (There is no narrative voiceover.) It’s also partly because of the distracting effect of other images on the screen. Buirski makes use of excerpts from ‘race films’, a movie genre, featuring black casts and designed for black audiences, that originated around 1915 and continued into the early 1950s. If Wikipedia is to be believed, race films tended to express:
‘… middle-class urban values, especially education and industriousness. Common themes included the ‘improvement’ of the black race, the supposed tension between educated and uneducated blacks, and the tragic consequences in store for blacks who resisted liberal capitalist values. … Race films typically avoided explicit depictions of poverty, ghettos, social decay, and crime … [and] rarely treated the subjects of social injustice and race relations …’
Although that suggests Recy Taylor, raised in a family of farm-workers and a sharecropper for much of her adult life, wasn’t a typical race film figure, Nancy Buirski uses a race film snippet to illustrate her plight. A young woman of colour, wearing a long white dress, runs away from an evidently frightening pursuer. Even if she is fleeing the threat of sexual violence, the young woman presents a somewhat romanticised image of a damsel in distress – less uncomfortable to watch than accounts of what happened to Recy are to listen to. Though race films are of great interest to social and film historians, I felt uncomfortable being encouraged to divide attention between an actual episode of outrageous sexual and racist violence and a fictional representation of black female terror. Buirski also supplements the information her witnesses are conveying with generic shots – lonely roads, tangled tree branches – even though the testimony hardly needs atmospheric reinforcement. The use of Dinah Washington singing ‘This Bitter Earth’ is problematic in a different way: it’s so emotionally potent that it threatens to eclipse everything else we hear. These devices, designed to dramatise the story and present Recy Taylor as a representative victim of a systemic evil, detract from the film’s exploration of a specific personal ordeal in a specific location.
As it describes the aftermath of the crime and court hearings, The Rape of Recy Taylor increasingly places the case in the context of the contemporary civil rights movement. Buirski’s archive material includes a small amount of home-movie footage of Recy’s family and plenty of news film featuring, among others, Rosa Parks and eventually Martin Luther King. This isn’t vexing as the race film snippets are yet the link that Buirski, with the help of interviewees like Danielle L McGuire and the African-American historian Crystal Feimster, tries to make between Recy and the Montgomery bus boycott seems forced. The film suggests the boycott was a matter of asserting the right of women of colour to live without physical threat and, as such, had Taylor and victims of similar crimes very much in mind. This doesn’t quite square with the interview Buirski gave to Kelli Weston in Sight & Sound (June 2018), in which the director is quoted as follows:
‘… I’ve discovered in showing the film that most white people didn’t know the story, but I thought more African-American women would know it and I’ve discovered they didn’t. And that’s because though this may have happened to their grandmothers and their aunties and to their great-grandmothers, there was a code of silence about it.’
It’s nevertheless understandable that Buirski gives a lot of coverage to MLK, Rosa Parks et al: without it, this documentary would be just too depressing. What happened to Recy and the culture the gang-rape reflects makes you feel both dismayed and powerless. You’re grateful for, even if not convinced by, the connection of the case to more fruitful developments in civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. And Buirski has done a valuable service committing to film an account, albeit a flawed one, of Recy Taylor’s long-overlooked ordeal and the events surrounding it.
The Rape of Recy Taylor can hardly fail to be grimly impressive, in various ways. The surname of the local sheriff who ’investigated’ the crime was Corbitt – the same as Recy’s family name because the sheriff’s ancestors owned Recy’s ancestors. (If this were a work of fiction, you’d dismiss that shared surname as a point-making contrivance.). The most rebarbative talking head is a white man called Larry Smith, introduced as a ‘local historian’ (though, on his own admission, ‘not a professional one’). Smith’s remark that, in slave-owning days, there were often sexual relations between white masters and their property and ‘I’m sure these relations were often consensual’, wins a keen competition for the film’s most breathtaking statement. Some of what isn’t said has great impact too. There’s little to suggest that the youthfulness of Recy’s torturers was advanced, even when some had admitted a degree of responsibility, as an excuse for what happened. It wouldn’t be, of course: for white boys in 1940s Alabama to use a black woman for sex was clearly regarded not just as an entitlement but as an accepted rite of passage.
Positive eloquence comes largely through Robert Corbitt and Alma Daniels. If Recy’s younger siblings aren’t the ideal means of conveying the facts of the crime, they’re compelling and dignified witnesses to its effects on themselves, their elder sister and other family members. Other interviewees mention that Recy and her husband eventually separated and that their daughter died in an accident but Buirski doesn’t clarify when these events occurred. Alma, on the other hand, makes succinctly clear that the events of 3 September 1944 meant her sister never became pregnant again. Most eloquent of all, there is Recy Taylor herself – predominantly in photographs, more briefly in the home-movie footage and as a voice on the soundtrack[2]. In the final minutes, Buirski shows the nonagenarian Recy, presumably in the nursing home where she ended her days, and we hear more from her. Alma Daniels is perhaps most outraged when she tells of how, after the attack, Recy was characterised by law officers, as well as by the rapists, as a prostitute and willing participant in what had happened. Alma stresses that Recy was no prostitute but a Christian, contrasting her sister’s enthusiastic churchgoing with her own. At the very end of the film, Recy says that the youths who kidnapped and attacked her could easily have killed her too but ‘the Lord was with me that night’. You wonder how anyone who suffered what she suffered could possibly think that. You wonder too at the moving proof that Recy Taylor did.
2 October 2018
[1] The book’s full title is 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.
[2] The source and date of the interview from which this vocal excerpt is taken are not made clear. Recy Taylor’s voice sounds much younger in these brief recordings of her voice than she does at the end of the film.
