When Tawana Brawley was discovered climbing into a garbage bag last Nov. 28 in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., her hair was partly chopped away, her head smeared with excrement and her torso marked with the words NIGGER and KKK. The tale sketched by the girl and her mother told of a horrific crime -- the kidnaping, rape and abuse of a black 15-year-old by six white men, one wearing a badge. Last week, after six months of fitful investigations, a judge finally ordered someone to jail -- not a suspect, but the girl's mother Glenda Brawley.
At that, the case lurched from the unusual into the bizarre. On the advice of lawyers, Tawana, now 16, and her mother Glenda, 33, have refused to help investigators. Through advisers, they charged that local authorities with racist motives were protecting the guilty. They demanded an outside investigation. When Governor Mario Cuomo obliged, appointing Attorney General Robert Abrams as special prosecutor, the Brawleys still refused to cooperate. Last week, after Glenda Brawley defied a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in Poughkeepsie, Judge Angelo Ingrassia fined her $250 and sentenced her to 30 days for contempt. The confrontation then revved up to a higher pitch when Mrs. Brawley took refuge in a New York City church to avoid arrest.
"How ludicrous," said her lawyer, C. Vernon Mason, "for the nation to see that the only person arrested in this case is the mother of a black rape victim. People should be outraged." First, however, they should be puzzled. When Mason delivered that line, Glenda Brawley had not been arrested. Moreover, Mason and two other radical Brawley advisers -- Attorney Alton Maddox Jr. and the Rev. Al Sharpton -- had contrived the events that turned her into a fugitive. Nothing could have made the trio happier than the spectacle of police charging into the Ebenezer Baptist Church to capture her. Sharpton, 33, a minister-at-large with a rock-star haircut and a vituperative style, gave voice to their fantasy. "Show the nation the moral beast you are," he challenged the attorney general. "Come through these doors and arrest her." But police made no moves at Ebenezer church or the Brooklyn church to which the mother later shifted.
What was going on? Understanding the impasse requires separating Tawana Brawley's misfortune into two distinct public matters. One, relating to what happened to the girl, is the Tawana Brawley case. The other, a creation of the lawyers and their sidekick preacher, is the Tawana Brawley cause. The aim of the cause is not to solve a crime but to fire up a political movement.
For five years, Maddox, 43, and Mason, 42, have busied themselves in New York cases with controversial racial implications. They represented the black victims attacked by white youths in the notorious Howard Beach case, and Mason defended one of the black teenagers shot by Subway Vigilante Bernhard Goetz. At every opportunity, the two lawyers attempt to put the justice system itself on trial. Says Columbia University Law Professor Gerard E. Lynch: "Mason, whom I know, and Maddox, from what I've read, see the judicial system as fundamentally unjust and racist, and that's the key to their strategy and tactics." Maddox said much the same thing to supporters last week: "Every decision we made in the Howard Beach case and the Tawana Brawley case is based on how it will affect black people."