The Rape of Recy Taylor

Recy Taylor was a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper in Abbeville, Alabama when she was abducted at gunpoint by seven white men and raped by six of them while walking home from church one evening in 1944. In spite of Jim Crow culture that made it terrifying for a black woman to report a rape, Taylor identified her rapists and pressed for legal recourse. The NAACP took up Taylor’s cause and sent its best investigator, a young activist named Rosa Parks, to rally support and lay groundwork for what would become an unprecedented outcry for justice.