18 Jun INDEPENDENT UK | THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR FILM REVIEW: QUIETLY DEVASTATING DOCUMENTARY ABOUT HARROWING CRIME
“The number of black women raped by white men in our country’s past is staggering,” reads the intertitle at the start of Nancy Buirski’s harrowing documentary. Buirski tells the story of one of those rapes. Recy Taylor was a young mother from Alabama who was assaulted at gunpoint by a gang of six white youths as she left church. The attack took place in 1944. Buriski has interviewed Taylor’s siblings and contemporaries. Her approach to the material is sombre, matter of fact and quietly devastating. Her interviews reveal the casual brutality of the white youngsters who “felt they could do it and get away with it” and who had been brought up to believe “the black woman’s body didn’t belong to her”. The response to the crime was revealing. Some of Recy’s assailants lived close by, “two football fields away”, and they could have been easily identified. Nonetheless, the authorities did next to nothing. A grand jury made up of local white men was predictably...