Oprah visits grave of Alabama civil rights icon Recy Taylor

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Recy Taylor | Oprah Winfrey at the 2018 Golden Globe Awards

On Tuesday, Oprah Winfrey visited the grave of Recy Taylor, an African-American Alabama woman whose story Winfrey highlighted in her recent Golden Globes speech.

Taylor was a 24 year old sharecropper in Abbeville, Ala. when she was kidnapped and raped by six men as she walked home from church. The case never went to trial, and two all-white, all-male juries refused to indict the men who confessed to assaulting her.

The NAACP heard of the atrocious acts and assigned a young Rosa Parks to interview Taylor in Abbeville. Parks eventually helped move Taylor to Montgomery in an effort to avoid revenge from her attackers.

Taylor died in December, just before her 98th birthday, and just three weeks after the release of “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” a documentary about the crime committed against her and systematic injustice.

Winfrey posted the following caption on an Instagram post documenting the event:

“I don’t believe in coincidences, but if I did this would be a powerful one. On assignment for 60 Minutes I end up in the town of Abbeville where RecyTaylor suffered injustice, endured and recently died. To be able to visit her grave so soon after ‘speaking her name ‘sharing her story, a woman I never knew.”