Betty Jean Owens

Last updated

Betty Jean Owens (born 1940) is an African American woman who was brutally raped by four white men in Tallahassee, Florida in 1959. [1] Her trial was significant in Florida, and the South as a whole, because the white men were given life sentences for their crimes. Prior to Owens' case, sentences of this severity had not been imposed in the South on white men accused of raping black women. [2] For example, in the case of Recy Taylor, who was gang-raped by six white men in Alabama, the men were never found guilty of any charges and released from jail with minimal fines. [3]

Contents

The attack

On May 2, 1959, four white men, William Collinsworth, Ollie Stoutamire, Patrick Scarborough, and David Beagles, set out together to find a woman to sexually assault. They approached a car at Jake Gaither Park armed with shotguns and switchblades. Patrick Scarborough pressed his shotgun against the African American driver's nose and ordered the occupants out of the car. [4] Four African Americans stepped out of the car, two men and two women. All four people in the car were students at Florida A&M University (FAMU). Scarborough forced the two black men to kneel on the ground, and David Beagles held the two black women at knifepoint. Scarborough ordered the black men, Richard Brown and Thomas Butterfield, to leave and they slowly drove away. [5]

The two black women left at the hands of the four white men were Edna Richardson and Betty Jean Owens. Edna Richardson broke free of the men and ran into a nearby park, leaving Betty Jean Owens alone with her attackers. Beagles promised to release her only if she did what they wanted her to do. [6] They drove her to the edge of town and subsequently raped her seven times. Edna Richardson and the other two male students were able to make it back to their car and went to the local police station to report what had happened to them. The officer on duty that night was a nineteen-year-old intern, Joseph D. Cooke, Jr. To the surprise of many people, he called for back up and searched for Owens. The officer spotted the assailant's car and a chase ensued. Eventually, the men pulled their car over and the muffled screams of Owens could be heard from the car. She was bound and gagged on the backseat floorboard. [7]

The four men were then arrested and taken to jail. The four men did not take their arrest seriously and joked with each other on the way to jail. All four men confessed in writing to having abducted Owens at gunpoint and raping her. [8]

Reactions to the rape


After FAMU students learned of the attack on Owens, a small group planned an armed march to city hall. This armed march would symbolize their protection of black womanhood with guns as the whites protected white womanhood. [9] Other student leaders argued against an armed march and instead planned a “Unity” demonstration. Fifteen hundred students entered the Lee Auditorium to demand justice for Owens, and the student leaders announced that they would petition the governor for a "speedy and impartial trial". The following day, over a thousand students gathered with signs and prayers that were broadcast over news media. Many of these students connected the events to other issues in the struggle for black freedom, such as the desegregation issues in Little Rock, Arkansas. These students held up posters with scenes from Little Rock that read, "My God How Much More of This Can We Take". Even the BBC broadcast segments of the FAMU student demonstrations. As a result of prominent media coverage, student protests, and a threat to boycott classes, Judge W. May Walker called together a grand jury into special session on May 6, 1959. [10] [11]

The trial

More than 200 black spectators entered the courtroom that day to watch the trial. A nurse accompanied Owens because she was still undergoing treatment for injuries as well as depression. All four men pled not guilty, to the shock of the spectators in the courtroom. The innocence pleas made a jury trial mandatory. This case was significant because, for the first time in Florida, a judge sent white defendants charged with raping a black woman to jail to await their trial. Previously, Florida had never executed a white man for raping a black woman, and many thought that this could be the trial to change that. [12]

Attitudes about the trial varied among black leaders. Ella Baker, the director the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, felt that the evidence in the case was so strong that the jury could not fail to convict. Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, said that the four rapists destroyed the "virginity of our daughters". Furthermore, he explained that "Appeals for justice will avail us nothing... We know there is no justice under the American flag." The Pittsburgh Courier wrote that the trial would most likely end in acquittal, although the case was "as open and shut as a case can be." Following the indictment of the four men, Martin Luther King Jr., expressed praise for the FAMU student protesters. King explained that they gave "hope to all of us who struggle for human dignity and equal justice." [13]

On June 12, 1959, Betty Jean Owens testified on her own behalf in front of 400 witnesses. She retold the events of the attack to the jury in detail. She told the jury, “I was so scared, but there was nothing I could do with four men, a knife, and a gun ... I couldn’t do anything but what they said.” The defence attorneys worked diligently to prove that Owens had consented to the attack and argued that if a rape did occur that she would have sustained more serious injuries. The doctors that treated Owens told the jury that her injuries resulted in a five-day hospital stay and that she was in a terrible condition. When the prosecution rested its case, the defence attorneys claimed that the state had failed to do anything but prove sexual intercourse had occurred and called for a judgment of acquittal. Judge Walker denied the motion and the defence was set to return the next day to present their case. [14]

The defense attorney claimed that the boys were intoxicated and that their taped confessions were inadmissible. However, under cross-examination, David Beagles admitted that his confession was voluntary. The defence tried to present the men as reputable and incapable of committing such a heinous crime. In another attempt to sway the jury, they characterized Owens as a Jezebel, who therefore could not have been raped. The jury read the verdict out loud: “guilty with a recommendation for mercy.” The “recommendation for mercy” part of the sentence kept the four men from facing the electric chair. Judge Walker deferred sentencing for 15 days and sent the four men to Raiford prison, now Florida State Prison. On June 15, 1959, Judge Walker sentenced all four men to life in prison. Following the sentence, Owens told reporters, “I feel better now for the first time since it happened. For the first time, I feel safe.” [15]

Later years

In 1965, David Beagles was paroled. Four years after he was released, he tracked down an African American woman that he thought was Owens, murdered her and buried her in a shallow grave. However, he had murdered Betty Jean Robinson Houston, a different woman. [16] He spent the rest of his life in prison. [17] [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

Rosa Parks African-American civil rights activist

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".

Montgomery bus boycott Protest against racial segregation

The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and a social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.

Chauncey Sparks United States historic place

George Chauncey Sparks, known as Chauncey Sparks, was an attorney and Democratic American politician who served as the 41st Governor of Alabama from 1943 to 1947. He made improvements to state education of whites and expanded the state schools and centers for agriculture. He campaigned for passage of the Boswell Amendment to the state constitution, which was designed to keep blacks disfranchised following the US Supreme Court ruling Smith v. Allwright (1944) against use of white primaries by the Democratic Party in the states.

The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was a United States civil rights organization, formed in 1946 at a national conference for radicals and disbanded in 1956. It succeeded the International Labor Defense, the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, and the National Negro Congress, serving as a defense organization. Beginning about 1948, it became involved in representing African Americans sentenced to death and other highly prominent cases, in part to highlight racial injustice in the United States. After Rosa Lee Ingram and her two teenage sons were sentenced in Georgia, the CRC conducted a national appeals campaign on their behalf, their first for African Americans.

Joan Little African-American woman acquitted in murder trial of a white prison guard

Joan Little is an African-American woman whose trial for the 1974 murder of Clarence Alligood, a white prison guard at Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina, became a cause célèbre of the civil rights, feminist, and anti-death penalty movements. Little was the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault. Her case also has become classic in legal circles as a pioneering instance of the application of scientific jury selection.

Jim Clark (sheriff) American sheriff

James Gardner Clark, Jr. was the sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, United States from 1955 to 1966. He was one of the officials responsible for the violent arrests of civil rights protestors during the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, and is remembered as a racist whose brutal tactics included using cattle prods against unarmed civil rights supporters.

The history of Tallahassee, like the history of Leon County, begins with the Native American population and its interaction with British and Spanish colonists as well as Anglo-American colonists and Africans escaping colonial slavery, as the Florida Territory moved toward statehood. Growing numbers of cotton plantations increased the settlement's population greatly. It became a city and capital in 1821.

Lillian Smith Book Award

Jointly presented by the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries, the Lillian Smith Book Awards honor those authors who, through their outstanding writing about the American South, carry on Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding.

Johnnie Rebecca Daniels Carr was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from 1955 until her death.

Jim Crow laws State and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Southern Democrat-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by black people during the Reconstruction period. Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.

Patricia Stephens Due

Patricia Stephens Due was one of the leading African-American civil rights activists in the United States, especially in her home state of Florida. Along with her sister Priscilla and others trained in nonviolent protest by CORE, Due spent 49 days in one of the nation's first jail-ins, refusing to pay a fine for sitting in a Woolworth's "White only" lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida in 1960. Her eyes were damaged by tear gas used by police on students marching to protest such arrests, and she wore dark glasses for the rest of her life. She served in many leadership roles in CORE and the NAACP, fighting against segregated stores, buses, theaters, schools, restaurants, and hotels, protesting unjust laws, and leading one of the most dangerous voter registration efforts in the country in northern Florida in the 1960s.

Recy Taylor

Recy Taylor was an African-American woman from Abbeville in Henry County, Alabama. She was born and raised in a sharecropping family in the Jim Crow era Southern United States. Taylor's refusal to remain silent about her rape by white men led to organizing in the African-American community for justice and civil rights.

Georgia Teresa Gilmore was an African-American woman from Montgomery, Alabama, who participated in the Montgomery bus boycott through her fund-raising effort selling food at boycott mass meetings. Her grass-roots activism helped to sustain the long boycott and inspired similar groups to begin raising money.

Rosa Parks Day

Rosa Parks Day is a holiday in honor of the civil rights leader Rosa Parks, celebrated in the U.S. states of California and Missouri on her birthday, February 4, and in Ohio and Oregon on the day she was arrested, December 1.

Euvester Simpson is an American voting rights activist and contributor to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. A Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member at the age of 17, she helped blacks learn to read, write, and register to vote in Mississippi during the movement. She was an active member in the movement through its entirety. She was involved in the Winona, Mississippi bus incident.

The Committee for Equal Justice was an organization founded with the goal of assisting black women reclaim their bodies against sexual violence and interracial rape. Recy Taylor and Rosa Parks founded the committee in 1944 after six white men kidnapped and raped Taylor, an African-American woman, as she left her Abbeville, Alabama church. Taylor's case garnered heavy media coverage. With this attention came national support, which led to what the Chicago Defender called the "strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade." Committee members formed eighteen chapters across the United States, and included such figures as WEB DuBois, Mary Church Terrell, Oscar Hammerstein II, John Sengstacke and Langston Hughes, among others.

"The Dark End of the Street" is a 1967 soul song written by songwriters Dan Penn and Chips Moman.

Viola White (1911–1954) was an African-American woman who lived in Montgomery, Alabama and is best known for her resistance to segregated bus laws. At 35 years old, in 1944, White was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. White's arrest occurred a decade before Rosa Parks' similar act of resistance, which is credited for starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott. White worked at Maxwell Air Force Base.

Henrietta Delancey Henkle, better known by her pen name Henrietta Buckmaster, was an activist, journalist, and author best known for writing historical studies and novels. She was also active in the civil rights movement.

Nancy Buirski Documentary filmmaker and producer

Nancy Buirski is an American photographer, documentary filmmaker and producer.

References

  1. ↑ "'It Was like All of Us Had Been Raped': Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle" by Danielle L. McGuire, The Journal of American History (2004) 91 (3): page 906.
  2. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pg 139
  3. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. (2010). At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Random House. pp. xv-xvii.
  4. ↑ "'It Was like All of Us Had Been Raped': Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle" by Danielle L. McGuire, The Journal of American History (2004) 91 (3): page 906.
  5. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pgs 131-132
  6. ↑ "'It Was like All of Us Had Been Raped': Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle" by Danielle L. McGuire, The Journal of American History (2004) 91 (3): page 906.
  7. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pgs. 132-134
  8. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pg. 134
  9. ↑ McGuire, D. L. (2011). At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance - a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Vintage Books.
  10. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pgs. 135-138
  11. ↑ The FAMUAN May 1959 http://famu.digital.flvc.org/islandora/search/may%201959?type=edismax&collection=famu%3A68368
  12. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pgs. 138-139
  13. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pgs. 139-142
  14. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pgs. 143-145
  15. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pgs. 147-151
  16. ↑ "Convicted Rapist is Sought", The Bryan Times, 1969-02-11, retrieved 2020-07-12
  17. ↑ McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Pg. 151
  18. ↑ "Florida Department of Law Enforcement - Sexual Offender / Predator Flyer: David E. Beagles" . Retrieved 2020-07-12.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.