Sunday Cinema is our program to highlight important and thought provoking films in the Main Hall on a Sunday night.
February 4th, 11th, 18th & 25th at 8pm
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.
Our film 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 work to find
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 Global March by Women
is 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.