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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
The Rape Of Recy Taylor [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
The Rape Of Recy Taylor [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
Nancy Buirksi’s documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor centers on a brutal sexual assault in Abbeville, Alabama in 1944. A 24-year-old African American wife and mother, coming home from a sanctified church service with a friend and her son, was forced into a car at gunpoint, and gang raped by six young white men. The beating heart of the film is the on-screen testimony of Taylor’s younger brother, Robert Corbitt, and her younger sister, Alma Daniels, who convey the unspeakably cruel and vicious character of the attack: Corbitt repeats the perpetrators’ directions to Recy: “They said they wanted her to …
Finding A New Home In Harlem: Alice Childress And The Committee For The Negro In The Arts, Judith E. Smith
Finding A New Home In Harlem: Alice Childress And The Committee For The Negro In The Arts, Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
Alice Childress’s performing career in the 1940s was primarily associated with the American Negro Theater, a collectively run professional theater company with a mission to nurture black talent and create compelling theater for Harlem audiences; as Childress would later comment, “We thought we were Harlem’s theater.” ANT made use of all available resources to accomplish this mission; producing plays written by black and white playwrights, hiring white teachers, and accepting white actors and technicians committed to its goals.