Movies

Oprah Winfrey’s Golden Globes Tribute To RECY TAYLOR

By Michelle McCue | January 8, 2018

Acclaimed actress, producer, television star and entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey was honored with the 2018 Cecil B. de Mille Award at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. During her rousing acceptance speech, Winfrey paid an emotional and heartfelt tribute to Recy Taylor.

Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists.

The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice.

Directed by Nancy Buirski, THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR, “exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story. An attempted rape against Parks was but one inspiration for her ongoing fight for justice for countless women like Taylor. The 1955 bus boycott was an end result, not a beginning.”

“More and more women are now speaking up after rape.”

“Our film tells the story of black women who spoke up when danger was greatest; it was their noble efforts to take back their bodies that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and movements that followed. The 2017 Women’s March and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement are linked to their courage. From sexual aggression on ‘40s southern streets to today’s college campuses and to the threatened right to choose, it is control of women’s bodies that powered the movement in Recy Taylor’s day and fuels our outrage today.”

The documentary is produced by Beth Hubbard, Claire Chandler and Susan Margolin.

In her review, MaryAnn Johanson (Flick Filosopher) says of the film: “Every American should see this movie, and be embarrassed by it. And astonished by it, for it tells a story that we should all already be so familiar with that it feels epic.”