Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society or even earn the label crime of the century.

But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author, and in each episode of this show,

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened. This is crimes of the centuries. If you're a woman you've likely been taught supposed pro tips on how to keep yourself as safe as possible when you're walking home at night,

arrange your keys between your fingers, keep alert, park under a streetlight.

Never let your guard down, we're told. Not even when you're walking with friends or

leaving a place you feel is completely safe, wholly even.

What's implied with these decrees, whether intentional or not, is that anything that happens to us

is because of us, our choices, our shortcomings. Now that's true today, so imagine

it's 1944 and you're not just a woman, but a black woman in Alabama, a woman like Racy Taylor.

It was a crisp fall night in September when she was kidnapped and raped as she walked home

with friends from church.

She survived and then had the strength to do what was nearly unfathomable in her day.

She talked about it.

She did not assume blame, and as a result, her case would not only become one of the most

famous sex crimes in American history, but it would create the foundational building blocks

for the civil Rights Movement.

To understand Riesi's story, we have to back up a good ways,

to the end of the American Civil War. Once slavery was outlawed, many newly freed

African Americans were forced into a dressed up form of enslavement called sharecropping. Rather than toiling in fields that they didn't own for no pay,

they instead toiled in fields they didn't own for next to no pay. In several ways,

their lives had not changed much since emancipation,

...