Latest / Both Things Are True Crime / Five Minutes: Recy Taylor
Transcript
- recy taylor: Alabama, Henry County, down near the Georgia line. Sunday night, September the third, nineteen forty-four. Three people are walking home from church. Reese Taylor, who is twenty four years old, a sharecropper, a wife, a mama, her friend Fanny Daniel, and Fanny's teenage son, West. These three have been together all day. And then a car comes up. Behind them and stops. And there are seven men in it, all of them white, all of them armed. One of them is an army private named Herbert Lovett. And Lovett says that Reese Taylor cut open a white boy over in Clopton. She didn't. She has been with Fanny Daniel all day, and Fanny Daniel, he's standing right here. But it doesn't matter, and it was never supposed to. It's a reason said out loud in front of witnesses. So that What happens next has a shape somebody could write down. They forced her into the car at gunpoint. And I'm not about to sit here describe what they did to her. You know what they did to her. Six of those men sexually assaulted Reese Taylor, and then they put her out on the road. And I'm not gonna spin this episode there, and I'm not gonna make you sit in it. She did not survive that night, so I could just use it like that and talk about it. What I do want to spend this episode on is what happened after. Because the thing that makes this legal story and not only a horror is that this crime was not hidden. It was reported that night, you guys. A man confessed within days, and he even named the others. A state attorney general got involved. Two grand juries looked at it, and not one person was ever charged. And I wanted to know how that is possible, not emotionally but mechanically. What has to be true about a legal system for it to be handed a confession and a witness and a victim and produce nothing? That is what this is. And there's one more thing. The investigator who came down to Appleville, I'm hoping that right, for the NAACP is somebody whose name you have all known since elementary school, and almost nobody knows she was there. But we're coming back to that. So let's talk about it. Here's the thing that makes Reese Taylor different from almost every woman that this happened to in Alabama in 1944. It was the mere fact that she told. And I want y'all to understand what that sentence actually cost because I feel like we can say it now like it was a brave in a way that gets you a medal. But in nineteen forty four in Henry County, it was brave in a way that got your house burned down. Because a black woman in the segregated South who accused white men of sexual assault, she wasn't making a complaint. She was committing a social offense. The accusation itself was the crime she would be punished for. And it was not Only her mouth that was at risk, it was her daughter, her husband, her father, her house. And she knew all of that. Everybody who lived there knew all of that. This was not no new information to anybody. No one had to be told this. But she told anyway. You know what, Fanny Daniel, she didn't wait either. She reported the kidnapping to police that night and she identified the car. Okay. So inside of hours, the system had a victim who was talking, an eyewitness who was talking, and a vehicle. With the name attached to it. And I just kinda wanna put that down clearly because the rest of the episode depends on it, okay? Because the case did not fail for lack of evidence. Did not fail because she stayed quiet. It did not fail because nobody saw anything. It failed with a confession sitting on the table. And then afterwards, they came for her anyway, you guys. The family was harassed. There was a fire at the house. They eventually left and they moved in with her father. And he sat up all night with a shotgun. And that's the price of telling. And she paid the whole thing and she got nothing for it for 70 years. So the car belonged to Hugo Wilson. That's the man who owned it. And Hugo Wilson Wilson, he admitted it. He's like, yeah, I picked her up. I carried her to the spot. Then he gave them six names. Dillard York was with me. Billy Hovertown, Howardtown, don't care how you say his name. Herbert Lovett, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper, Robert Gamble. So three eyewitnesses identified him as the driver. Stop and count. What law enforcement is holding at this point, you guys. They got a name suspect, his own admission, six more names from his own mouth, and three witnesses who put him behind the wheel. You got a victim giving a statement, a second adult witness who reported it in the same night. Like, duh, this is not a thin case. Most people would be happy to have a case, not happy to have a case like this, you know what I'm saying? But happy to have so much information to be able to put the bad guys away, right? Isn't that what y'all was supposed to do as prosecutors? Like I think in any other set of circumstances, this is a case a first-year prosecutor just would not be able to lose. But let me tell you what happened with it, okay? Because police did not call in the men he named. The sheriff never arranged a lineup, which meant Resey Taylor was never given the chance to point at anybody and say it is him. And that absence, it gets used against her later. Because without an identification, you can stand there and say, How can she even identify her attackers? Huh? But Hugo Wilson, who admitted to taking her, he was fined two hundred and fifty dollars. That was it. For what she faced, that's the entire legal consequence any humanist faced. Back in that time, on september third, nineteen forty four, someone's birthday. That fine was smaller than a used car. And later the sheriff he goes out in public, right? And he's like, I investigated immediately, and I arrested everyone involved in two days after and set a bond. That was all a lie. None of it was true. He also said things about her character, which is the other half of the machine, and we're gonna get to that in a minute, okay? We're gonna get to that. Don't don't don't sleep on that. We're gonna get to that. But I I wanna name what I think this is. And I'm telling you up front that this is just my read and not a finding anybody made. Obviously, I don't think this was incompetence because incompetence is something that is unfortunate. Even incompetent, loses the paperwork sometimes and does his job other times. Nah, nah, nah, nah. This is too consistent. Every single discretionary decision available to a human being in this chain got made through the same direction. Do not pick them up. Do not run the lineup. Charge the one who confessed with almost nothing. Then go lie about it to the newspaper. That's not a system failing. That is a system working. It's just not working for her. So The case goes to a grand jury. Before we walk into that room, I want to tell you what a grand jury actually is. I don't feel like people are explaining that stuff. We kind of have a like a slight idea, but let's really don't really talk about it, okay? a grand jury does not decide guilt. It decides whether there's going to be a case at all. And there's four things about that room, and every one of them matters in about 90 seconds. One, it's secret. Nobody's watching, there's no public gallery, press, transcript, the town can read. What gets said in there stays in there. Secondly, it's one sided. The prosecutor is the only one that presents. There's no defense attorney, cross examination, nobody in that room is arguing the other way. Which basically means the prosecutor. decides what those jurors see and what those jurors never hear about. Three, the standard is very low. It's not a reasonable doubt. It's a probable cause. and probable cause like is enough that police officers can go off of. So it's basically gives there enough here that this should go to a real trial. And that's just a floor, not a ceiling. And fourth, no it's final and it's unreviewable. When a grand jury votes to charge, that is a true bill and the case goes forward. When it declines, that is a no-bill, and the case just stops. So this is the part I want y'all to hold on to while we're talking about this, okay? Because a no-bill is not an acquittal. Nobody was tried, found not guilty. This is not double to jeopardy, which is why they could come and did come back and try again. But it is also not appealable because there's nobody to appeal to. A victim cannot appeal it. The press cannot appeal it. The state cannot overrule it. So now Let's put those four things together and let's look at what is built. A secret room, one lawyer talking, the lowest standard in criminal law, and a choice nobody can review. I'm calling that a machine with no windows and literally not a handle on the outside. And I found this little joke that I think is like really funny, 'cause I think I've got shirt in the movie before. or is it well in order? Okay. That's very corny. But I I've heard it somewhere. that the a grand jury will indict a say a ham sandwich. And it's a joke, but the joke is that the standard is so low and the process is so one sided that the prosecutor who wants an indictment gets one essentially every time. Which I think should tell you something uncomfortable but also very useful. Because if a grand jury does not indict, that's almost never the jury being careful. That's the room telling you what it wanted. Hold on to that as well, because we're gonna talk about it. October 3rd and October 4th, 1944, one month after, the grand jury's all white and all male, and they deliberate for five minutes. Five. With a confession on file with six names in the confession with three eyewitnesses on the driver. Five minutes is not a deliberation. Five minutes is not even long enough to read the file. Five minutes is how long it takes twelve or eighteen men to argue about something they've agreed about before they sat down. So it gets turned into a no bill. And then the thing that almost never happens happens. The black press ain't have it to do, okay? So the pressure, the foot they put up on they neck. From the black press and from the committee of Montgomery, it got so loud that the governor of Alabama was ordered to look at it again and they went back. So then february fourteenth, nineteen forty five, a second grand jury, the state attorney general himself, presents this case. Unless I understand what that means, because the second time around, the most senior law enforcement officer in the state of Alabama walks into that room with the case, all male, all white. Are we so shocked? No bill. Nobody was ever charged. Not one of the seven men in that car, not the one who confessed. And I want you to go back to the thing I told you at the door because now you can use it. A grand jury will indict a sham sandwich and a prosecutor who wants an indictment gets one, essentially. Every single time. So a case this strong presented twice the second time by the state's own attorney general that produces nothing twice is not telling you the evidence is weak, it's telling you who was sitting in the room, which is the thing we have to talk about. Next thing, because that's not an accident either. That was the law. So I don't think any of y'all should be questioning. why both of those rooms were all white in a county with a large black population, okay? 'Cause I think we should already know that the maddening answer is that by nineteen forty four it was already illegal, right? Eighteen eighty, Strauder versus West Virginia, one hundred classic US three three. The Supreme Court holds that excluding black men from juries because they are black violates the fourteenth Amendment. Eighteen eighty? That is sixty-four years before Resey Taylor walked home from church. And then because sixty-four years was apparently not enough, the Supreme Court had to come back and say it again in Alabama about this exact thing. Nineteen thirty-five, Norris versus Alabama, which is two ninety-four US five eighty-seven. I did learn how to read these for a pro safe case. for my own stuff. That's how I like to use this, okay? One of the Scott's Boroughs cases. In Alabama, black men had been excluded from jury roles for decades, and the state defense was essentially that, it just happened that way. But the Supreme Court's like, nah, we got it to do. If qualified black residents exist in a county and none of them ever appear in a jury role year after year, that pattern itself is the proof. We don't need a memo, the numbers are the evidence. And that was in 1935, nine years before. So in 1944 in Henry County, Alabama, two all-white grand juries sat on the Reese Taylor case in open defiance of two Supreme Court decisions, one of which was about Alabama specifically, and nothing happened. And the other half of that room is even simpler because nobody was hiding it. All male was not defiance of anything, y'all. Alabama did not allow women to serve in juries at all until a federal court struck it down in White versus Crook in 1966. So in 1944, the state of Alabama guaranteed that the only people who would ever decide whether to charge six white men with sexually assaulting a black woman were white men. By law for half of it. And by ignored law for the other half when you really think about it. But here's the thing I want you to leave with for this part. So I'm gonna say it slowly, okay? Because she did everything right. She survived it. She reported it that night. She had a witness, a confession, she had the black press, a national committee, and Eventually the Attorney General of Alabama carrying it. And it did not matter. Because the case does not get decided by how strong it is. A case gets decided by who is allowed to be in the room when the choice happens. They didn't have to break the law to be there. They just had to control the composition of the two juries. And the machine didn't necessarily fail her. I feel like the machine was built. Now, when I started this off, I kind of promised y'all something some interesting information, okay. So the black press picked up this case and they wouldn't let it go. The Chicago Defender ran it. The NAACP got involved. And the NAACP, they said the baddie down there to investigate. Sorry, I hope that wasn't appropriate, ma'am. They sent our love, Rosa Parks. And I want to say the next part carefully because I feel like the way this country teaches Rosa Parks is One of the most successful pieces of flattening I've ever seen. Because the version most of us got in school was that Rosa Parks was just like a tired seamstress who would not stand up one day in nineteen fifty five because her feet hurt and a movement grew around her like almost by accident. But that woman does not exist. That Rosa Parks was never real, y'all. No no no no. Rosa Parks was a trained investigator and the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. And the work she did for years before that buzz was specifically for this sexual violence against black women in the South, going to the places it happened, sitting with women, taking statements, building files. She was doing that in 1944 on this case. So Rosa Parks takes the case back to Montgomery. And with E.D. Nixon and others, she helped build what became the Committee for Equal Justice for Miss Reese Taylor. And that committee pulled in some names, okay? W.E.B. Du Boys, Mary Church, Terrell, Langston, Hughes. It went national. They wasn't playing with them, okay? So now let's count forward. 1944. We got Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, the Montgomery NAACP, the Black Press, the National Committee, and a fundraising and organizing network built around one woman's case. Then December 1955, we have Montgomery, Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, the Montgomery NAACP, the Black. Press, a national committee, and a bus boycott that runs for three hundred and eighty-one days. That ain't no coincidence and ain't no coming of age story. The organizing machine that ran the Montgomery bus boycott was assembled eleven years earlier. And one of the things it was assembled for was Miss Reese Taylor. Which means the version where this is like a quiet seamstress who gets on a bus tired is not just incomplete, it's backwards. Okay. She was Not a woman who had a moment. She was a woman who had a decade of infrastructure built in part on a case that no one ever got charged in. And Reese Taylor's almost never in that story. The case that helped build the machine does not get named when people talk about what the machine did. And I think that's a little tragedy of its own. And that's why I wanted to put it in here and talk about it. So after the second no bill, the national attention goes away, right? Because that's what national attention does, right? The men, they stay in Henry County, and Reese Taylor, she stays too for a while and then Her family leaves because people kept coming at them and they even had a fire at their house. Like, come on, y'all. So her and her husband and her daughter moved in with her father, and her father just for nights set up with a shotgun in his lap. And I want you to think about the arithmetic of that for her every single day. Because in this case, she lives in the county with the men who did it. She knows their names because the one who confessed set their names out loud, and everybody in town knows, and the state Has formally declined twice to say anything happened. So you're not a woman something happened to officially, you're a woman who just said something happened. And she ain't never stopped saying it. This is the part I think people want to skip past when they call her a victim and move on. No, no, no, no. She kept telling it for the rest of her life to anyone who acts and plenty of people who did not. And she ain't never recant. Not once, not under pressure, not for peace, not to be left alone. She lost her daughter in nineteen sixty seven. Her husband died before her. And for decades, that was the whole public record. Just like kind of almost like a footnote in a civil rights history, if anything. But a historian broke it open. In 2010, Daniel McGuire published a book called At the End, Dark End of the Street. And it reframed the entire civil rights movement. It's a book, guys. It reframes the entire civil rights movement around sexual violence against black women and the organizing that grew up to fight it. And Resey Taylor is the Opening of the book. And that is 66 years after the walk home from church, and is the first time most people in this country ever heard her name. So April 21st, 2011, the Alabama legislature they adopt a joint resolution, and they say the failure to prosecute was morally abhorrent. Abhorrent. I cannot I wanna I can I can typically abhor abhorrent. I can typically say that word for some reason it's like not coming for me. and repugnant and it expresses the state's profound regret for its own role. You better. And on Mother's Day 2011, they brought it to her at Rock Hill Holiness Church. The church she walked home from. She was 91 years old. And I want to be very precise about what that document is because it this is the last piece of law in this episode. And it is the one that will annoy you, okay? Because it is a resolution, is it not a conviction, not a finding, it's not a settlement, it's not compensation. A legislator cannot indict anybody, cannot reopen a grand jury, cannot undo a no-bill. And by 2011, every man in that car was dead anyway. So what Alabama handed Reese Taylor 67 years later was the state's own admission. That it did this to her with no remedy attached. And she took it. And she said she forgave him. And she said it out loud publicly about the state that let six men go. And listen, I'm not gonna tell you how to feel about that because that is hers. I'm only gonna say this. I think it's easy thing for a country to apologize to somebody. When everybody who could have been punished is already in the ground and the Statue of Limitations ran out decades ago. I think the apology cost Alabama nothing. And I think it cost her everything to still be alive to receive it. A documentary comes out And three weeks after it comes out On December twenty eighth, two thousand seventeen, Reese Taylor dies in her sleep in a nursing home in Alabama and she was ninety seven. And she died in Aprilville. And ten days later at the Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey stood up and said her name to a room full of people who had never heard it and to a few million more at home. nineteen forty four to twenty eight, seventy four years from a road in Henry County to a microphone in Beverly Hills and she missed it by ten days. And I wanna say my own thing, and it's not about the men in the car. I don't have anything to say about them that is worth your time, okay? It's about the five minutes. I kinda keep coming back to that in my head when I think about this case because a room full of men in October nineteen forty four with a confession in front of them and six names in it, taking five minutes. Five minutes is not a decision. I say five minutes as a formality performed by people Who already knew what they were going to do before they walked in. They sat down, so the paperwork would say they sat down, in my opinion. And this is why the specific detail will not leave me alone. I realized it the other day, okay? Because the law worked exactly as written that day. Grand juries are secret, the standard is low, a no-bill is final, nobody can appeal it. Every one of those rules is still in the books right now. None of them were broken. They did not have to break anything. They just had to make sure the right people were sitting in the chairs. And this that's the thing I think that about procedure that nobody tells you when you're learning it, I think. That a rule is not fair or unfair by itself, right? A rule is a shape and w whoever controls who stands inside it kinda decides what comes out. You can follow every single step correctly and you can still produce a just Awful result, and afterwards, every person involved gets to say that no, we didn't buy the book, and they'll be telling the truth. It's the same thing about like Latasha. It's the s it's the same thing. It's like it's the it's it's the exact same thing. It's the exact same thing to me actually. About the heart. Understandable. And sorry, I'm not like completely finishing my sentences because like sometimes I'm talking and like like I like like I don't know, like it just like hits me a little bit. Like, it's the exact same thing. Like, they're telling the truth. Understandable. The judge was allowed to see that for the Harlan's case. Understandable. And I and and I think the reason most people have never heard of Reese Taylor is partially that, because there's no villain moment in the story outside of the the that men. There's no corrupt judge taking an envelope. There's no cop planting anything. There's no scene you can put in a movie and point at it and say, There's the crime. The crime was distributed. It was a sheriff not making a phone call. It was it was a freaking fine instead of a charge. It was a jury roll that had been wrong since eighteen eighty and nobody fixed. It was five minutes. And I think that is harder to be outraged at, right? And I think it's a thousand times more dangerous because a villain can be removed in a shape. It just kinda keeps sitting there when you really think about it. And then I got one more thing and I'll move on, okay? Then I'll move on. She told in 1944 in Henry County, Alabama, a 24-year-old sharecropper with a husband and a baby and a father to lose. Told. And she never took it back. 73 years and she never once took it back. And the law gave her nothing and she kept her account anyway. That ain't a victim. That's a witness who outlasted the entire apparatus that was built to make her shut up. I'll calm down now. So here is tonight's both things are true, okay? Because we know always gotta do it, okay? You always gotta find a point where I say both things are true. The grand jury system did exactly what it was designed to do twice. It screened a case, it applied a standard, and it returned a decision that nobody has the power to review. So the procedure was followed. Nothing was violated. And in Henry County, Alabama in nineteen forty four, that correctionally functioning system Delivered six men home to their dinner. Both of those things are true at the same time. And it is the most uncomfortable sentence I think I've said in this entire episode. Because it means that the problem was not that somebody broke the law, the problem is that a procedure is only as good as the people you let stand inside it. And the law had already said that out loud in 1880 and then again in 1935. And Alabama just did not do it. And nothing happened. And I'm not sitting here telling you grand juries are evil because they're not. The secrecy, it does exist for real reasons. So that somebody who gets investigated and cleared does not have to have it follow them around forever. Like it makes sense and the low standard exists because this is a screen and not a trial. You have to understand that a thing can be well designed and still be a weapon, depending entirely on who is holding it. And that's why both these are true. And I don't know, maybe that's the most useful sentence I I maybe that's the most useful sentence I can hand y'all. Okay. I I you're not safe because the rules are good. You're safe. When the rules are good and the room is full. And Reese's Taylor room was never full. I think that was the whole case. The drawer it was already messed up. She was twenty-four years old walking home from church with her friend. Just living like me as one's wife, mother, daughter. And she was failed by a sheriff and a fine and two grand juries and by a jury role that had been illegal for 64 years and by a state that waited until every man who did it was dead before they said they were sorry. And you know what? People be so much stronger than me because she took it anyway. And she told. She told. And she took their song. She kept telling for 73 years and she never once took it back and the law gave her nothing. The only thing she ever actually got was people saying her name out loud and then she died ten days before the biggest night of that. I just kinda hate stuff like that sometimes, okay? Okay. So don't be forgetting her name. Put some respect on her name. It's Rizzy Tate, okay? Cause she did that. She did that. And that is what I call a warrior. Rest in peace.