For over 25 years, the Zen Peacemakers have been annually Bearing Witness at Auschwitz/Birkenau. In this spirit, it has long been our desire to create a bearing witness retreat around America’s racial history – as seen through the eyes of African Americans. The intention has always been to engage without becoming a tourist; to seek unity without ‘othering’ those with whom we Bear Witness.

This year we plan on walking the grounds of a deep history in the expansion of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement – 

Your support in viewing this film will help fund our Bearing Witness Retreat in Alabama from April 24 - 29th. Thank you, Zen Peacemakers.

Zen Peacemakers

The Rape of Recy Taylor

Nancy Buirski

Claire L Chandler

Susan Margolin

Dr Amy Tiemann

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.

Produced by Transform Films and Odyssey Impact