Light Shines on Unsung, Unappreciated Groundbreaking African Americans
Laura Wheeler Waring is one of the most important painters of her time while Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor are equally influential in the civil rights movement.
The three icons are largely unsung and largely unappreciated.
Waring, who died in 1948, was among the greatest black female artists of the 20th century. She was most renowned for her realistic portraits, landscapes, still-life and well-known African American portraitures she made during the Harlem Renaissance.
Warings’ works are included in a new exhibit, “Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art,” that features more than 400 works by historically marginalized cultural artists.
The exhibition also has brought attention to Parks and Taylor, two women who attracted national attention for the growing civil rights movement after Taylor was gang raped on Sept. 3, 1944, near Taylor’s small Alabama town, by a group of white men. None of them were ever prosecuted.
The 1940s were a time when Jim Crow was the law in the segregated southern states. It was a period when lynchings and rapes of black women were not unusual and the guilty were rarely prosecuted. It was a time when finding justice for a Black woman was impossible.
The two women went on to lead a national campaign against sexual assaults on women. More than a decade later, Parks became a hero of the fledgling civil rights movement when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, in violation of local laws.
Parks herself had been a victim of sexual assault by a white neighbor who tried to rape her in 1931.
Taylor grew up in Abbeville, Ala., to a sharecropping family. She was 17 years old when her mother died and left her to care for six younger siblings. Taylor married Willie Guy Taylor and they had a daughter, Joyce, who was 3 when her mother was attacked.
Abbeville, located southeastern of Alabama, had a population of less than 2,500 people. The town had a troubled history, starting on May 20,1906, when an arsonist burned down most of the town. A mechanic named Ward was arrested and charged with arson. He jumped his $500 bail and fled, never to be heard from again.
In February 1937, Wes Johnson, an 18-year-old African American man, was accused of attacking a white woman and was arrested. He was abducted from the Henry County jail by a mob of 100 white men and lynched: shot and hanged to death.
As was typical of lynchings, none of the members of the mob was charged with a crime. Historians have said that Johnson and the white woman were engaged in a consensual sexual relationship; the accusation of assault was a made-up pretext for the lynching.
In 1937 the Alabama Attorney General filed an impeachment against the Henry County sheriff for his failure to protect Johnson. The impeachment was overturned on appeal and the Alabama Attorney General declared that Johnson was innocent of all charges.
On November 5, 2002, Kirkland Street was hit by an F2 tornado. The tornado destroyed several single-family homes, mobile homes and many other homes and businesses. The damage at the Abbeville High School was deemed too costly to repair and was rebuilt in a new location. Downed power lines and uprooted trees were numerous and widespread.
In 1944, Recy Taylor, an African American woman, was gang-raped by seven white men. The men admitted the rape to authorities, but two grand juries declined to indict them. The Recy Taylor case was the foundation for the landmark Montgomery bus boycott a decade later.
Taylor, a 24-year-old mother, was with a friend, taking the two-mile walk home from a revival at Rock Hill Holiness Church in her small Abbeville, Ala., town on the evening of Sept. 3, 1944. Around midnight, a green Chevrolet passed Taylor and her friend before the carload of white men armed with guns and knives, suddenly pulled up. Taylor tried to get away, but she was grabbed at the point of a shotgun by one of the men and forced into the sedan.
The gang blindfolded Taylor and drove her into a grove of pine trees, where, one by one, each of the six men brutally raped the young woman, threatening to slit her throat if she screamed. A few days later, the NAACP office in Montgomery learned of the rape and sent its best investigator to find out why there had been no arrests. The investigator was 31-year-old Parks.
Taylor’s father, Benny Corbett, was searching for his daughter and around 3 a.m., he saw her staggering along the deserted roadway. A friend, Fannie Daniel, had seen Taylor abducted and fled while she later reported the kidnapping to Will Cook, a former police chief who also owned a store. Taylor and her father also reported the assault to the then-local county sheriff, Lewey Corbitt.
The car belonged to a town resident, Hugo Wilson. Taylor identified Wilson as one of the rapists. He was held in jail and released the next day after he confessed to participating in the attack. Wilson gave up the names of his accomplices including U.S. Army Private Herbert Lovett, Billy Howerton, Dillard York, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper and Robert Gamble. Culpepper later fought in the Korean War and was honored as a war hero in a parade in Abbeville.
Four of the six accused attackers admitted to having intercourse with Taylor but claimed she was a “prostitute” and “a willing participant.” The sheriff accused Taylor of being “nothing but a whore” and alleged that she had been treated for venereal disease. The next day, Taylor’s house was firebombed by white vigilantes.
Parks arrived at Taylor’s home and was interviewing her when the sheriff burst in and threatened Parks and demanded that she leave. Parks returned to Montgomery, where she and Taylor started the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Taylor with the help of nationally known civil rights voices such as W. E. B. DuBois, Mary Church Terrell, and Langston Hughes.
The committee flooded the South with fliers “decrying white attacks on black women.” By October 1944, Taylor’s rape was headlines in newspapers across the country. The Chicago Defender, a leading African American newspaper, ran a headline, “Victim of White Alabama Rapists,” above a now-famous photo of Taylor sitting on a sofa, dressed in a hat and checkered blazer with her daughter, Jayce, on her lap and her husband, Willie Guy Taylor, beside her.
The Defender reported that the lawyer representing the suspects had offered $600 to Willie Guy Taylor to stop his wife from talking about the rape.
“N‑‑‑‑‑ — ain’t $600 enough for raping your wife,” the story quoted the lawyer saying. The six defendants were willing to pay $100 each “if Recy Taylor would forget.”
A grand jury was convened and on Oct. 9, 1944, the jury refused to indict the men. Parks and the NAACP were incensed and called on people to write protest letters to then-Alabama Gov. Chauncey Sparks.
The governor sent investigators, and a second grand jury was held on February 14, 1945. By that time, three more of the men confessed to raping Taylor, but none were prosecuted. The six white men admitted to authorities that they had raped Taylor, but the two all-white grand juries declined to indict them. As most Blacks could not vote, they were excluded from juries.
Sparks was a segregationist and governor from 1943 to 1947. He was a mentor of the segregationist future governor George C. Wallace. Alabama, like other Southern states, had established legal racial segregation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; it excluded blacks from voting by a variety of devices and had Jim Crow as the custom. Sparks had pledged to continue “absolute segregation” and to stop a “flood of negroes” from registering to vote.
In 1972, Sparks’ house in Eufala was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Shortly before she died, Taylor was the subject of a 2017 documentary, “The Rape of Recy Taylor.”
“Many ladies got raped,” Taylor said in the film. “The peoples there — they seemed like they wasn’t concerned about what happened to me, and they didn’t try and do nothing about it. I can’t help but tell the truth of what they done to me.”
The case gained renewed attention in 2010 with the publication of historian Danielle L. McGuire’s, “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance — a New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.” The book prompted the Alabama House of Representatives to issue an apology to Taylor on behalf of the state for not prosecuting the gang, declaring that “such failure to act was, and is, morally abhorrent and repugnant, and that we do hereby express profound regret for the role played by the government of the State of Alabama in failing to prosecute the crimes.”
The rape left Taylor unable to have additional children. She and her husband eventually separated in the 1960s, shortly before his death. Taylor continued sharecropping in Abbeville until she moved to Florida in the 1965. Her only child, Joyce, died in a car accident in 1967. Taylor died in 2017 at an Abbeville nursing home, a few days short of what would have been her 98th birthday.
The Committee for Equal Justice formed 18 chapters across the United States and included such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Oscar Hammerstein II, John Sengstacke and Langston Hughes, among others.
Parks became an NAACP activist in 1943, participating in several high-profile civil rights campaigns.
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake’s order to vacate a row of four seats in the “colored” section in favor of a white female passenger who had complained to the driver, once the “white” section was filled. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. The federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Leaders of the Committee for Equal Justice went on to form the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the historic Montgomery Bus Boycotts. The improvement association was led by civil rights advocates Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Edgar Nixon.
The Committee for Equal Justice brought national attention to sexual assault of black women that was widespread in the South. The Committee for Equal Justice empowered women to report acts of sexual violence directly to the NAACP, in addition to writing letters to the Justice Department.
Parks also drawn national attention while defending the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American male teenagers who were wrongly accused of raping two white women in 1931. Parks also fought against the Ku Klux Klan, and joined the NAACP.
As the Committee for Equal Justice grew, it became a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee which claimed that communists led the committee, who were using the campaign to exploit the rape of Taylor. Some members of the committee were communists, but it also included many non-communists.
Waring
Waring was one of the few African American artists in France, where she first gained widespread attention, exhibited in Paris, won awards and spent the next 30 years teaching art at historically black Cheyney University in Pennsylvania. In 1914, she was granted the A. William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship to study art at the Louvre in Paris. She was the first Black woman to receive the award.
Wheeler’s mother, Mary, had been prominent in anti-slavery activities, including the Underground Railroad in Portland, Maine and Brooklyn, New York.
Waring was among the artists displayed in the country’s first exhibition of African American art, held in 1927 by the William E. Harmon Foundation. She was commissioned by the Harmon Foundation to do portraits of prominent African Americans and chose some associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her work was displayed in American institutions, including the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She currently has portraits in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2024 exhibit, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” reintroduced Waring’s work to a new audience.