In “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” a recently released documentary, you see the face of bravery. It is Recy Taylor, the 24-year-old African-American — a wife and mother of an infant daughter — kidnapped in 1944 by a carful of young white men, some the sons of the “respectable” leaders of Abbeville, Alabama, where they all lived. A gun held to her head, she was blindfolded, driven to a remote spot and violated in unimaginable ways. She escaped being killed by promising to keep quiet.
But she did not keep that promise.
Taylor’s legacy can be seen in the women speaking up now about sexual harassment of all kinds, most recently Alabama women who on the surface have little in common with a poor black sharecropper from decades ago. In fact, Beverly Young Nelson, who became the fifth woman to accuse Roy Moore when she tearfully recounted her story of an alleged sexual assault, said she and her husband voted for Donald Trump, while Taylor, in her midcentury time, was not allowed to vote at all.
