MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Finally today, we want to take you back to Oprah Winfrey's speech at the Golden Globes last week, a speech that brought many in the audience to tears and to their feet. She was accepting an award for contributions to the world of entertainment, but the billionaire broadcaster and philanthropist decided to use her moment to tell the story of a far less celebrated woman, Recy Taylor.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS")
OPRAH WINFREY: In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and a mother. She was just walking home from a church service she'd attended in Abbeville, Ala., when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church.
MARTIN: Later that night, a colleague reminded me that I had spoken with Recy Taylor myself with the help of historian Danielle McGuire back in 2011. So here is Recy Taylor telling her story in her own words.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
RECY TAYLOR: A car running around up the side of us. Six young men jumped out with a gun and said that you the one that cut a white boy and clocked him. And the police got us out looking for you. You get in the car, and we'll take you uptown to the police station. And they got me in the car and carried me straight to the woods. But before they got where they was going, they blindfolded me. After they messed up and did what they was going to do to me, said, we going to take you back. We going to put you out. But if you tell it, we going to kill you.
MARTIN: Did anything ever happen to them for what they did to you?
TAYLOR: No, ma'am, nothing.
MARTIN: After that time - and that's a terrible thing to happen to someone, and I'm so sorry that that happened to you.
TAYLOR: It sure is.
MARTIN: How do you think that it affected your life? Were you afraid to go out after that and things like that?
TAYLOR: I didn't go out at night. And then I got afraid of living right there after that happened too because I was afraid that maybe something else might happen.
MARTIN: In Oprah's speech, she added another important element to the story.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS")
WINFREY: Her story was reported to the NAACP, where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case. And together, they sought justice. But justice wasn't an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted.
MARTIN: In 2011, I asked Recy Taylor how she felt about that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
MARTIN: Do you feel better now that the world knows about this? Or I guess you would feel better if you knew that those young men had been brought to justice for what they did. I assume that would make you feel better, but...
TAYLOR: Yes, that would make me feel better. Hey, it happened to me like that. But it just happened to me. And I couldn't help myself. And then the people there seemed like they wasn't concerned about what happened to me and didn't try to do nothing about it. I just get upset because I do my best to be nice to people. I don't want people to mistreat me and do me any kind of way and I have to live with it because I had to live with a lot with going through with this.
MARTIN: Let me add a few more details that Oprah did not have time to tell, such as the fact that the local sheriff knew who had kidnapped Recy Taylor but never arrested them, or the fact that 1 of the 7 accomplices admitted he was there but claimed he was just a bystander, or the fact that eventually, four of the accomplices admitted what they had done but claimed the rape was - wait for it - consensual. There's also the way that some of the major Southern newspapers at the time all but ignored the crime against Taylor until national pressure forced their hands or, just as evil, were complicit in passing along the false story that she was a prostitute or a willing participant. Is it any wonder that when, after a campaign of local and national pressure finally led authorities to act, two all-white male grand juries refused to hold anyone accountable.
Recy Taylor's story haunts us in part because of how she carried her pain with a strength we could still hear in her voice but also because it is the story of many women whose names we will never know. But we know her name because she would not be kept silent and also because another woman, Rosa Parks, along with many men, amplified her voice.
Can I just tell you though, Recy Taylor's story also haunts us because it is the story of many others, a few of whose names we now know and many we do not. It's the story of the men who raped her and the community and the country who raised them and shaped them. I wonder about those young men. Did they hold doors open for their white mothers and sisters? Did they call them ma'am and sister? Did they marry and have daughters and dance at their weddings and worry about them when they came home late? I bet they did.
I bet they had friends and jobs and people who spoke nice words about them at their funerals, made excuses, said everybody did it. It's how we were raised. It's just what we thought. We didn't know it was wrong. But they did know. At their core, they had to know because they, like Recy Taylor, were human beings. And in treating Recy Taylor as less than human, in refusing to recognize her as human, they left a piece of themselves on the floor of those woods where they attacked her. I'd venture to say that all those who dehumanize others for the sake of their own pleasure or to protect their own power leave a piece of themselves behind as well. To my knowledge, Recy Taylor, who died last month just a few days shy of her 98th birthday, outlived her attackers. She died with her humanity intact. How many others will be able to say the same?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARAABMUZIK'S "WANTED")