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We will also feature a live interview with members of the Immokalee Women's Organization. They are farm workers in Florida, involved in a campaign to stop workplace sexual harassment by their employers. Their campaign to get large food companies to refuse to buy their food from suppliers who harass and abuse their workers has been largely successful, but Wendy's food chain is a holdout and the Immokalee Women will be organizing a hunger strike at Wendy's headquarters over the next week--and they would like our suport.
We will also be presenting our worldwide Feminist News Segment and playing excerpts from "The Rape of Recy Taylor."
BACKGROUND AND ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT THE SCREENING, AND FILM: "THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR"
On March 7, International Women's Day Eve, Joy of Resistance, Multicultural Radio @WBAI is honored to present an important advance screening of the newly released and critically acclaimed film: "The Rape of Recy Taylor," (https://tinyurl.com/ycqrj3t3) directed by Nancy Buirski. The screening will take place at The Brooklyn Commons (http://thecommonsbrooklyn.org/); it will start at 7:00 PM and be followed by a panel and discussion with the audience. This is a benefit for WBAI, listener supported non-commercial radio and there will be an admission fee at the door. (You can order tickets in advance by going to https://give2wbai.org.)
Recy Taylor was a Black sharecropper in Alabama who, in 1944, was on her way home from church when she was forced into a car at gunpoint by seven white men, taken into the woods and gang raped. Such rapes of Black women were not uncommon in the Jim Crow South. Recy was threatened with death if she told anyone, but she did tell and risked violent retaliation by making a complaint to the local sheriff's office. Her home was firebombed shortly thereafter (the family escaped uninjured). The NAACP came to her aid and sent their best organizer. Her name was Rosa Parks. "The Campaign for Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor" was the result--and it gained national attention. Although all white, all male juries twice refuse to indict the rapists, this struggle--which later extended to fighting for justice for other Black women raped in the South by white men--laid much of the organizational foundation of the later flowering of the Civil Rights Movement.
Recy Taylor's story and the political campaign that arose out of it, came to light in 2011, with the publication of 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." This story was not part of the usual historical telling of the Civil Rights movement--largely because the conventional history is centered on male leaders and not on women's concerns, such as rape.
Because of McGuire's research, this "new history" finally came to be public knowledge--and forced the Alabama State Legislature to issue a belated apology to Recy Taylor for the denial of justice she had received at the hands of the State of Alabama so many years before. McGuire's book is credited by the filmmakers as their inspiration for the film. At the Golden Globes Awards this past January, Recy Taylor's story was told in z stirring speech delivered by Oprah Winfrey--in the context of the #metoo movement; it was a speech that went viral.
Please turn out to support WBAI on March 7, and celebrate International Women's Day and see a great film and take part in an important discussion about the issues it raises.