Oprah Winfrey used her inspirational Golden Globes speech to invoke the name of an African-American woman who died last week, decades after her horrific kidnap and gang rape by white men in 1944 was ignored by police. Recy Taylor's fight for justice in Alabama encapsulated the racial divide in the Jim Crow South and became a lightning rod for civil rights struggles around America.
She died aged 97 on December 29, 73 years after an all-white, all-male jury refused to indict her six white attackers - despite their admission of guilt to authorities. They have never been charged. Then, aged just 24, the married woman was walking home from church with two friends when a car carrying seven men approached.
The men kidnapped her at gunpoint, before driving to a grove of pine trees at the side of a deserted road.
There, at least six of the teenage boys made the mother-of-one undress and took turns in raping her. Once they were finished they left her blindfolded at the side of the road miles from her home in Abbeville, Alabama.
Told she would be killed if she went to the police, brave Taylor put her faith in the justice system and identified the men but none were ever prosecuted. Two grand juries failed to indict any of her attackers, causing uproar in the black community who fought for justice in a system infected with institutionalized racism.
Six years before her death, and 67 years after she became the center of a civil rights struggle, the Alabama state government apologized to her for 'its failure to prosecute her attackers.'
She was 'raped and left blindfolded by the side of the road, coming home from church,' Winfrey told the Golden Globes audience, on the day that, ironically, would have been Recy's 98th birthday.
'They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone,' Winfrey went on.
'She lived, as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by the brutally powerful men,' she added.
Speaking to a room intent on challenging systemic sexism and abuse within their own industry, Recy's assault galvanized black people across the country, sowing the seeds for the Civil Rights movement that would come.
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