The Rape of Recy Taylor

Staggering numbers of women were raped in the Jim Crow South. In danger for their lives, they did not report the crimes and their stories were kept hidden. Not Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old mother who was gang raped by 6 white boys in 1944 Alabama. Unbroken, she spoke up, and with Rosa Parks and legions of women, fought for justice.

West Coast premiere! Includes a post-film conversation with Director Nancy Buirski, Producers Laurens Grant and Beth Hubbard, Sandy Banks, senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy (CCLP) and Jody Armour, Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law at the University of Southern California. Moderated by Tim Cogshell, KPCC Film Week critic.

Nancy Buirski is the Director/Producer/Writer of THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR that recently premiered at the 74th Venice Biennale and New York Film Festival. It was awarded the Special Prize for Human Rights at Venice. Buirski is the Director/Producer/Writer of BY SIDNEY LUMET (2015), which premiered at Cannes, and AFTERNOON OF A FAUN (2013), which premiered at the New York Film Festival and Berlinale, with a record-breaking U.S. theatrical release by Kino Lorber. She is Director/Producer/Writer of the Oscar shortlisted, Peabody and Emmy Award-winning THE LOVING STORY (2012). She is a Producer of LOVING by Jeff Nichols. She is directing ENDANGERED, an animated feature based on Eliot Schrefer's YA novel and will direct a narrative version of AFTERNOON OF A FAUN. 

Jody David Armour is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law at the University of Southern California. He has been a member of the faculty since 1995. Armour’s expertise ranges from personal injury claims to claims about the relationship between racial justice, criminal justice, and the rule of law. Armour studies the intersection of race and legal decision making as well as torts and tort reform movements.

A widely published scholar and popular lecturer, Armour is a Soros Justice Senior Fellow of The Open Society Institute’s Center on Crime, Communities and Culture. He has published articles in Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Southern California Review of Law and Women's Studies, University of Colorado Law Review, University of Pittsburgh Law Review, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, Southwestern University Law Review, and Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. His book Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America (New York University Press) addresses three core concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement—namely, racial profiling police brutality, and mass incarceration. He has recently completed a second book that examines law, language, and moral luck in the criminal justice system. Armour often appears as a legal analyst on NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, KPCC, KCRW, and a variety of other television and radio news programs. At the request of the US Department of State and European Embassies, Professor Armour has toured major universities in Europe to speak about social justice as well as Hip Hop culture and the law. His work on the intersection of these topics grew into a unique interdisciplinary and multimedia analysis of social justice and linguistics, titled Race, Rap and Redemption, produced by USC alumna J. M. Morris, and featuring performance by Ice Cube, Mayda del Valle, Saul Williams, Lula Washington Dance Theatre, Macy Gray Music Academy Orchestra, and Mailon Rivera.

Laurens Grant is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - Documentary Branch [Oscars] and the Television Academy [Emmys]. She is also a 3-time Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmaker and a Sundance Institute filmmaker fellow. Grant was a producer-director on the critically-acclaimed CNN series The Nineties, working with Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog.

Additionally, Grant directed the documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement which received an NAACP Image Award nomination for outstanding news special. Actor Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy is Executive Producer. The film also screened in London at the British Urban Film Festival and at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. Grant produced the Peabody and Emmy-nominated documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution; directed the Emmy-winning documentary Jesse Owens, the first full-length documentary about the African-American Olympian and the 1936 Olympics. And produced the Peabody and 3-time Emmy winning documentary Freedom Riders which influenced the Hollywood films: Selma and Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

Additionally, Grant has had 3 films premiere at the prestigious Sundance film festival. 

Sandy Banks is a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy (CCLP)

During a journalism career that spanned almost four decades, Sandy Banks has explored and explained the forces that shape our public conversations and impact our private lives.

Her 36 years at the LA Times included stints covering education, religion, criminal justice, and race relations. She also served as education editor, editorial writer, assistant metropolitan editor, and director of the newsroom’s diversity efforts. She was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Banks is best known for her twice-weekly Times columns, which focused on the universal elements that bind and connect us across culture, color, and community identity. Her perspective on social, political and economic issues – race, education, criminal justice, foster care, mental health, homelessness – was bluntly shared and poignantly rendered. Her columns provided a voice for the ignored, unheard and unknown.

Over the years her work has been honored by a broad array of journalism organizations and civic groups, including the National Council of Jewish Women/Los Angeles, Muslim Women’s League, California Teachers’ Association, Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles, Southern California Psychiatric Society, Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic, Los Angeles African-American Women’s Public Policy Institute, National Alliance on Mental Illness-Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Commission For Women, USC Annenberg Black Student Association, Greater Los Angeles Press Club, American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, and Society of Professional Journalists/Los Angeles.

TV/Film Producer Beth Hubbard’s career began at The Mount Company in production on Bull Durham and Tequila Sunrise. As an executive, she supervised Sean Penn’s directorial debut, Indian Runner starring Viggo Mortensen and Patricia Arquette. As an independent producer Hubbard produced RITUAL starring Clarence Williams and Denise Nicholas (Ventura Films), Woo starring Jada Pinkett (New Line Cinema) and Runteldat starring Martin Lawrence (MTV/Paramount). She went on to produce a series of reality specials entitled Almost Famous for TV 1 and Executive Produced the APT animated series, The Zula Patrol.  She recently completed production on the documentary entitled The Rape of Recy Taylor which just debuted at the Venice and New York Film Festivals. Hubbard is currently shooting the definitive documentary on Arthur Ashe and producingWallis Annenberg’s production of Turn Me Loose starring Joe Morton.