Eventually the car stopped, and seven young white men, armed with guns and knives, stepped out. One of them, Herbert Lovett, the oldest in the group, ordered the three to halt, and then pointed a shotgun at them when they ignored him.

The men forced Mrs. Taylor into the car at gunpoint and drove her to a grove of pine trees on the side of the road, where they forced her to disrobe. She begged to be allowed to go, citing her husband and their 3-year-old daughter. But Mr. Lovett was unmoved. Ordering her to “act just like you do with your husband or I’ll cut your damn throat,” he and five other men raped her. (A seventh young man, Billy Howerton, said later that he did not take part because he knew Mrs. Taylor.)

Dumped out of the car, Mrs. Taylor removed her blindfold and stumbled toward safety. Her father, Benny Corbitt, had learned of the abduction and gone searching for her. Soon the county sheriff, George H. Gamble, arrived.

Mrs. Taylor told Sheriff Gamble that she could not identify her assailants, but her description of the car matched only one vehicle in the county, that of Hugo Wilson. When the sheriff returned with Mr. Wilson and his father, Mrs. Taylor identified Mr. Wilson as one of her attackers, as did the teenage friend.

Questioned at the county jail, Mr. Wilson acknowledged that he and five others — Mr. Lovett, Dillard York, Luther Lee, Willie Joe Culpepper and Robert Gamble — “all had intercourse with her,” but insisted that they had paid her and that it was not rape. The sheriff sent Mr. Wilson home.

The next evening, Mrs. Taylor faced new threats: White vigilantes set her porch on fire. The following day, she and her husband, Willie Guy Taylor, and their daughter, Joyce Lee, moved in with her father and siblings. Mr. Corbitt, her father, would sleep in a chinaberry tree in the backyard, watching over the family while cradling a double-barreled shotgun, going inside to sleep only after the sun rose.

As word of the crime spread through Alabama’s black community the N.A.A.C.P.’s Montgomery chapter sent Mrs. Parks, who had spent much of her childhood in Abbeville, to interview Mrs. Taylor.