Recy Taylor -handbag

This wonderful gold leather handbag measuring 13' X 11". It's fully lined with two interior leather pockets and two exterior pockets. The leather handle is a creative piece with no definite shaped design, yet easy to carry, This is definitely a one of a kind as all "Handle it handbags" are. The embellished pieces on the front are  mixed with hair on hide (leather) as well as snake skin and another soft skinned leather, in brown and golds. This easy to carry and can go anywhere handbag is a keeper and conversation starter.

                         You're never alone with a handbag

Recy Taylor,(1919-2017) a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, on Sept. 3, 1944, when she was abducted and gang-raped by six white men. The crime, which N.A.A.C.P. activist Rosa Parks investigated and which garnered extensive coverage in the black press, never saw an indictment for the accused.          In the film “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” director Nancy Buirski explores Taylor’s story. Faced with few options for legal recourse, Black women chose to share their stories, drawing on a longstanding history of testimony and truth-telling to shed light on their pain. Members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, or SNYC, together with Rosa Parks and other primarily female activists helped spread Recy Taylor's story all the way up the coast to Harlem, New York. Stories of Taylor's assault were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier making the "rape of Recy Taylor a southern injustice" which "immediately sparked nation-wide interest." This led to a publication in the New York Daily News titled "Alabama Authorities Ignore White Gang's Rape of Negro Mother" and attacked the long lasting segregation and defense of white womanhood as well as the "manipulation of interracial rape to justify violence against black men. It wasn’t until 2011, nearly 60 years after the case, that the state of Alabama issued a formal apology to Taylor for her treatment by the state’s legal system.

 Although the Recy Taylor case did not succeed in the short term, the bravery of these women helped to mobilize communities and build coalitions that would become the pillars of the civil rights movement. Taylor died in Abbeville Dec. 21, 2017, three weeks after the release of the film.