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Stories of Rape and Resistance
Both Eyes on the Prize and the interviews in this exhibit address the interconnectedness of white supremacy and patriarchy in the segregated South. Episode one of Eyes, "Awakenings," tells the story of Emmett Till, lynched for the alleged offense of whistling at a white woman. After their acquittal, journalist William Bradford Huie interviewed Till's killers. Because they could not be re-tried, the men spoke openly about their crime. In his interview with Blackside, Huie recounts what one of them told him about his decision to murder Till: "J. W. Milam looked up at me and said, ‘Well, when he told me about this white girl he had... my friend, that's what this war's about down here now... that's what we got to fight to protect.'" According to Huie, Milam said to Till, "'Boy, you ain't ever going to see the sun come up again.'"
Fear of miscegenation, or racial mixing, undergirded white racists' resistance to integration in the South. Men like Milam used spurious arguments about racial purity to justify brutal acts of racist violence.53 For their part, many white women weaponized white patriarchal power to shore up their own relative privilege, falsely accusing Black men of assault, as Carolyn Bryant did to Emmett Till.54
The interviews collected here shed light on the racialized sexual violence and misogyny of the Jim Crow South. Robert Williams discusses the attempted rape and beating of a Black woman, Lilly Mae Reed, and the assault of a Black hotel maid named Georgia White, both by white men. Williams was head of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and he worked to ensure that the men were prosecuted. But the trials failed to deliver justice for either woman.
In his interview, Williams describes the anger of the Black women in the courtroom following one of the acquittals. They criticized him for trusting the legal system to deliver justice. This was a watershed moment for Williams. "I turned to them, and I said, from this day forward, we will meet violence with violence," Williams told his interviewer. "We will enforce our own laws. We will become our own judges, our own juries, and our own executioners." Williams became one of the most outspoken advocates of what he called "armed self-reliance" for African Americans.55
Some of the civil rights movement's leading activists were at the forefront of the fight against racialized sexual violence in the South. Before she became a household name for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, Rosa Parks helped form the Committee for Equal Justice to raise legal funds for Recy Taylor, a Black woman raped by six white men. E. D. Nixon, chairman of the Montgomery, Alabama, NAACP, was also on the frontlines of this struggle. In her interview, Virginia Durr, the wife of Parks's attorney and an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement, discusses the work of her nephew, the lawyer Nesbitt Elmore, on behalf of Black women raped by white men. Durr laments that historians have largely overlooked this chapter of civil rights history.56
These are not the stories that Eyes I tells. The filmmakers did not use Robert Williams' interview in the series, and Eyes I does not address Parks's, Nixon's, and Durr's work on behalf of Black women rape victims. However, the full-length interviews collected here suggest the critical, albeit often overlooked, role that Black women and the struggle against white patriarchy played in dismantling Jim Crow.
The Interviews
The following list identifies the women Blackside filmmakers interviewed during the making of America, They Loved You Madly and Eyes I. In listing their names here, our goal is not to separate these women from the broader movement, but to showcase their contributions, which civil rights histories too often ignore.
Victoria Grey Adams: SNCC field secretary; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) board member; founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation that attended the Democratic National Convention in 1964
Melba Beals: One of the "Little Rock Nine" who integrated Little Rock Central High School
Frances Belser: Montgomery bus boycotter
Unita Blackwell: Member of SNCC and the MFDP delegation that attended the Democratic National Convention in 1964
Eliza Briggs (and Harry Briggs, Sr.): Plaintiff whose case against the school board in Summerton, South Carolina, was combined with other suits in Brown v. Board of Education
Annie Devine: Co-founder, MFDP
Virginia Durr (1979; 1986): Avid supporter of the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights struggle
Myrlie Evers: Wife and secretary of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers
Mrs. Folgate: Montgomery bus boycotter
Georgia Gilmore: Montgomery bus boycotter; helped raise money to support the boycott
Patricia Harris: Took part in the Birmingham, Alabama, youth marches in 1963
Casey Hayden: Founding member of Students for a Democratic Society and SNCC volunteer; wrote "Sex and Caste" with Marry King addressing gender inequality in the movement
Coretta Scott King: Attended the Disarmament Conference in 1962 as a representative of the Women's Strike for Peace; NAACP member, SCLC activist, and wife of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Marcia Webb Lecky: Little Rock Central High School student
Rutha Mae (with Willie Hill Jackson): Lived near Greenwood, Mississippi, during the Emmett Till murder trial, which took place in Sumner, Mississippi
Leola (Brown) Montgomery: Mother of Linda Brown and wife of Oliver Brown, one of thirteen plaintiffs in the case of Brown v. Board of Education
Constance Baker Motley (1985; 1986): First Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary and first Black woman appointed to the New York State senate; groundbreaking Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) attorney
Diane Nash: SNCC co-founder; movement leader during the Nashville sit-ins and Freedom Rides.
Rachel West Nelson: Nine-year-old during the Selma, Alabama, campaign in which both she and her parents were active
Gussie Nesbitt: Montgomery bus boycotter
Rosa Parks: Helped establish the Committee for Equal Justice to raise funds for Recy Taylor; Parks' arrest instigated the Montgomery bus boycott
Bernice Johnson Reagon: SNCC field secretary and member of the Freedom Singers
Jan Robertson: University of Mississippi student who witnessed the riots that broke out in response to James Meredith's attempts to enroll
Amelia Boynton Robinson: Active in the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama; her beating by a state trooper on "Bloody Sunday" helped propel the passage of the Voting Rights Act
Jo Ann Robinson: Leader of the WPC and founding member of the Montgomery Improvement Association
Normareen Shaw: Owner of Mack's Café in Marion, Alabama, where state troopers shot Jimmie Lee Jackson; Jackson's death precipitated the Selma to Montgomery march
Linda Brown Smith: One of thirteen plaintiffs in the case of Brown v. Board of Education
Vanessa Venable: Black schoolteacher in Farmville, Virginia, when the county chose to close the schools rather than integrate
Sheyann Webb: A child during the civil rights campaign in Selma, Alabama; took part in the Selma to Montgomery march
Next: Organizational Activists
