Oprah Winfrey’s History Lesson On Recy Taylor, Ignored America’s Origin of Rape and Racism… #MLKDay #MeToo
Oprah Winfrey continues to be lauded for her ‘arousing’ speech given at this years Golden Globes. The same white women who abandoned her and almost destroyed OWN in 2008 when Oprah dared endorse Obama over Hillary; are now cheering in unison for an Oprah 2020…because now she’s back in their corners, touting their stories & saying all the right things to appeal to their covert racist feminist agendas.
Who knows what the black woman thinks of rape? Who has asked her? Who cares? ~Alice Walker
Many of you have applauded Oprah for bringing Recy Taylor’s name to the world stage but Oprah has known who Ms. Taylor was for years and had ample time and a network to give voice to her painful past. However, Oprah has never met an opportunity that she would not exploit for her own capitalistic agendas, so using Ms. Taylor in that moment should not have been a surprise.
Any agreement of Oprah’s inclusion and equivalency of the violent rape of Recy Taylor, to the sexual allegations of rape from rich white women in Hollywood for fame and fortune, is like racist white people saying ALL LIVES MATTER, when BLACK LIVES MATTER is invoked.
As I mentioned in my earlier blog about Oprah’s shameful speech injecting/comparing Recy Taylor’s violent rape with that of rich white women in Hollywood was disgraceful, even for Oprah. I will repeat, there is no comparison of the murders, lynchings, threats and violent rapes that black women have had to endure for centuries to that of rich white women in Hollywood, who more often than not, chose their sexual exploits for fame and fortune.
The history of rape in America, was focused ONLY with the rape of white women by black men. Black women’s bodies were considered chattel and not equal to that of white women and therefore not equal in laws. After the Civil War, the widespread rape of Black women by white men persisted. Black women were vulnerable to rape in several ways that white women were not. First, the rape of Black women was used as a weapon of group terror by white mobs and by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. Second, because Black women worked outside the home, they were exposed to employers’ sexual aggression as white women who worked inside the home were not. The legal system’s denial that Black women experienced sexual abuse by both white and Black men also persisted, although statutes had been made race-neutral. Even if a Black victim’s case went to trial-in itself highly unlikely, procedural barriers and prejudice against Black women protected any man accused of rape or attempted rape.
The racist rule which facilitated prosecutions of Black offender/white victim attempted rapes by allowing the jury to consider the defendant’s race as evidence of his intent, for instance, was not applied where both persons were “of color and there was no evidence of their social standing.” That is, the fact that a defendant was Black was considered relevant only to prove intent to rape a white woman; it was not relevant to prove intent to rape a Black woman. By using disparate procedures, the court implicitly makes two assertions. First, Black men do not want to rape Black women with the same intensity or regularity that Black men want to rape white women. Second, Black women do not experience coerced sex in the sense that white women experience it. These attitudes reflect a set of myths about Black women’s supposed promiscuity which were used to excuse white men’s sexual abuse of Black women. An example of early twentieth century assumptions about Black women’s purported promiscuity was provided by the Florida Supreme Court in 1918. In discussing whether the prior chastity of the victim in a statutory rape case should be presumed subject to defendant’s rebuttal or should be an element of the crime which the state must prove, the court explained that: What has been said by some of our courts about an unchaste female being a comparatively rare exception is no doubt true where the population is composed largely of the Caucasian race, but we would blind ourselves to actual conditions if we adopted this rule where another race that is largely immoral constitutes an appreciable part of the population. Cloaking itself in the mantle of legal reasoning, the court states that most young white women are virgins, that most young Black women are not, and that unchaste women are immoral.
The traditional law of statutory rape at issue in the above-quoted case provides that women who are not “chaste” cannot be raped. Because of the way the legal system considered chastity, the association of Black women with unchastity meant not only that Black women could not be victims of statutory rape, but also that they would not be recognized as victims of forcible rape. The criminal justice system continues to take the rape of Black women less seriously than the rape of white women. Studies show that judges generally impose harsher sentences for rape when the victim is white than when the victim is Black. Jane Fonda recently stated:
Weinstein’s Victims are White and Famous, and That’s Why We Care~Jane Fonda
Oprah didn’t lament on the differences and the pain that black women and black families suffered during Jim Crow, nor did she mention that historically charges of rape was only pushed when black men were accused of raping white women. Rape was a crime that was only prosecuted or executed when the alleged rape was that of a black man against a white woman. Oprah will never talk about these atrocities like the name of Jeremiah Reeves, a 22-year-old African American, a former jazz drummer, who was executed by the state of Alabama by electrocution after being convicted of raping a white woman in 1952. At the time of the events, Reeves was 16 years old, working as a grocery delivery boy; at his trial, he denied having had sex with the white woman. He was later executed. Jeremiah Reeves was a classmate of Claudette Colvin (Colvin the black woman who refused her seat in Montgomery, 9 months before Rosa Parks).
Oprah didn’t mention the Scottsboro Boys, 9 young black boys, ages 13–19 who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, all white jurors rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. The case was first returned to the lower courts and the judge allowed a change of venue moving the retrials to Decatur, Alabama. Judge Horton was appointed. During the retrials, one of the alleged victims admitted to fabricating the story and asserted that none of the Scottsboro Boys touched either of the white women. The jury found the defendants guilty, but the judge set aside the verdict and granted a new trial. The judge was replaced and the case tried under a judge who ruled frequently against the defense. For the third time a jury, now with one African-American member…returned a guilty verdict. The case was sent to the US Supreme Court on appeal. It ruled that African-Americans had to be included on juries, and ordered retrials. Charges were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants. Sentences for the rest ranged from 75 years to death. All but two served prison sentences; all were released or escaped by 1946. One was shot whilst being escorted to prison by a Sheriff’s Deputy and permanently disabled. Two escaped, were later charged with other crimes, convicted, and sent back to prison. Clarence Norris, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death in the final trial, “jumped parole” in 1946 and went into hiding. He was found in 1976 and pardoned by Governor George Wallace, by which time the case had been thoroughly analyzed and shown to be an injustice. Norris later wrote a book about his experiences. The last surviving defendant died in 1989.
Oprah also ignored the “Groveland Four”…In 1949, four black men…Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas were accused of raping Norma Padgett, a 17-year-old white girl.
There were doubts about Padgett’s testimony from the onset, but in the era of Jim Crow, a jury convicted the men without evidence of a crime.
The July night incident of The Groveland Four— CNN
Padgett claimed that on the night of July 16, 1949, her car broke down in Groveland. She said the four men stopped and raped her.
The men were arrested. Three of them were tortured until police were able to elicit a confession from two of them.
Thomas, who managed to escape custody, was killed after a manhunt.
Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison.
Shepherd and Irvin received the death penalty.
While being transported from county jail for a retrial, the sheriff fatally shot them both and claimed self-defense.
Shepherd died at the scene and Irvin survived by playing dead. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison.
In April of 2017, after more than 60 years, the Florida House issued them a posthumous apology.
“As a state, we’re truly sorry,” Rep. Chris Sprowls said to the men’s families Tuesday, after lawmakers unanimously voted to exonerate them.
“The memories can’t be erased, the pain they’ve endured can’t be fixed but today we have an opportunity to provide closure to these families in the form of an apology,” Rep. Bobby DuBose, who sponsored the bill that called for their pardon.
There are many other black men who were hung, murdered, executed and beaten to death because of the lies of white women, Emmett Till is the most famous…a young black kid brutally beaten to death for whistling at a white woman. There is also the tragic execution of George Stinney, a 14 year old black boy in SC, wrongly executed for killing two white girls…another black man/child murdered and given a posthumous forgive us from the state after decades of denying the truth.
America went from horrific lynchings to unjust and equally horrific executions of black men who were accused of raping, looking at, or speaking to a white woman.
One white woman, the wife of an ex-Congressman, stated in 1898, “If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand times a week if necessary.
There is NO solidarity with white women when it comes to rape, white liberal/feminists trying to erase the true history of rape and their roles in it, is like their continued erasing of slavery and denying reparations while still benefiting from the wealth that slavery created, white supremacy and all of its tentacles.
Oprah was wrong to include Recy Taylor without providing the differences and the real history of rape in AmeriKKKa…when will we as black people stop being wooed by celebrity and moving speeches, instead demand action over symbolism!
Note: Legal info taken from University of Maine School of Law 1983 — Rape, Racism & the Law.
From Russia With Love,
Charlie Peach
