Interview: Brother of Jim Crow-Era Gang Rape Victim Fights for Justice

Last month, I wrote about Recy Taylor, an African-American woman gang-raped during the Jim Crow era. Her confessed assailants never faced any consequences, a miscarriage of justice that caused international upset. Now, her brother, Robert Corbitt, has launched a petition on Change.org requesting an apology from the state of Alabama and city of Abbeville. Mr. Corbitt spoke with us via phone from his home, still in Abbeville, Alabama, and we're running this interview in honor of International Women's Day. Please join the 1,000 Change.org members who have signed the petition so far.

Change.org: What led you to begin investigating your sister's case?

Robert Corbitt: I was talking to her one day, and the rape came up, and she got teary-eyed and started to cry, and right then I felt there was a need for something to be done about it. I found that she was still hurting, pretty bad, after 65, 66 years or something like that. And that’s how I really got started with it, right there. I started to look up court documents and things that I could find. I went to the library, and I spent hours there looking for newspaper clippings from the microfilms, and never found anything there -- I found pages missing, and I start to realize that some of the pages had been removed. ... I tried out the courthouse, they couldn’t find anything on Recy Taylor, so I presumed that everything was missing or had been taken out of there, too.

So one day I was sitting at my computer, in the search I typed in my sister’s name, and there comes an article by Danielle McGuire. It was a short article, it was telling about the night that she was kidnapped and raped, and it exposed the name of one of the men, and that was the first tiny bit of justice we got. ... She had all the information that we didn’t have: the investigation and the state testimony that was made in those days, she had all of that, but we didn’t have anything, we only knew what happened. So thank God for Danielle. And then when she wrote the book, I tell you that really straightened out all the lies that the police had told, about all those guys. And I was able to read the statements they [the accused] made, and all of them admitted that they participated in the kidnapping, that they participated in the rape, but the police said it never happened. ...

When I look at the material that Danielle had and the threats we got back in those days, I sometimes think those threats were made by the police, and not people outside the police department. ... I don’t think that the peoples in the city know too much about it because the police kept it so hid. I was talking to a white guy one time, I used to work for his father, and we got to talking about that, and he didn’t even know that rape took place.

You said you were nine at the time of her assault. How much do you remember from that time?

I tell you, when something like that happen, a young child don’t forget it. ... We knew all of the rapists, and the police was there to talk to us on the back porch, and he [one of the rapists] was on his porch, while they was telling us all the lies. And another rapist lived just past him, 2 or 3 hundred feet. ...

Two or three days after the rape, Recy’s house was firebombed. It landed on the porch, and her husband was able to go there and put it out before it caught the house on fire, and right then Recy and her husband moved into the house with her brother. And my father had to sit in the tree for a period of time and guard the house, while everybody’s asleep in the house. ...

The first time the police came to get statement from us, they bust in the house without asking permission to come in, and two weeks later, they come in very hostile, and pull her by the arms to get her out of the house, and on the steps she didn’t have time to go down the steps, she had to like jump from the porch to the ground, and she landed on her knees. And I was on the front porch watching all of this. ...

Recy was the oldest and I was the youngest, and my mother became very sick when I was about a year old, and she knew she was gonna die, so she called Recy to the bad and said, "I want you to take care of my children, because I’m not going to be here much longer." That same day she passed away, and Recy was like a mother to the family then. ... She only had one child, this child was two years old when this happened, and she always said that she wanted to have a big family, and I wondered if this rape has to do with her not having any more children.

What do you want to achieve at this point?

I think that people here, right now they realize that this took place here, and I put one of Danielle’s books in the library, and they’re checking that book out of the library to read about what’s going on. All of these peoples is dead that raped Recy, except one who might be alive, but if he is he’s in the nursing home. About the only thing we can ask for now is an apology from the city for the lack of justice that they gave us at that time -- you know the police is the one that said it didn’t happen even when the rapists said it did. And also the state of Alabama, because it did go to the capital for a grand jury hearing, and they threw it out there. ...

One of the statements the police said was that my sister was the town whore, he used to arrest her every weekend and all that, and after the Feds was questioning he changed all of that and he told the truth about her. Recy was a good woman, she was a Christian, she was in church every time the church doors opened, and she always lived a Christian life, but they really gave her some hard names to make it look like she went with those guys. And I always wondered how they could make that statement when in the investigation they said she was taken by gunpoint. ...

How does Recy feel about the fact that you decided to take up her campaign?

Well, you know, I talked to her and I said, "Recy, let’s go see what I can find out about this," she said that was okay with her. ... But Abbeville is a changed place now, very changed. Even the people that know me that are white, sometimes I start to talk with them about it, and all of them feel that something should be done for justice for my sister. And that’s mostly from reading the book, because they just didn’t know anything about it.