Twenty five years ago, 15-year-old Tawana Brawley was reportedly found dazed and confused lying in a garbage bag with torn and burned clothing, feces smeared over her body and “KKK,” “ni**er,” and “b*tch” written on her torso, in Wappingers Falls, New York and taken to the emergency room.
Eventually, Brawley, through nods, shrugs and written notes, revealed to a black officer that she had been kidnapped and raped in a wooded area by white men over a four-day period.
Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney Steve Pagones was among the white men implicated in the horrendous act, as well as part-time police officer Harry Crist, Jr., who committed suicide on December 2nd, days after Tawana Brawley was found on November 28, 1987.
For nearly a year after Brawley was discovered, her story fueled New York City media coverage, even though Wappingers Falls is some 70 miles from New York City.
The story made national headlines as well, landing in People and other publications and dominating broadcast news programs, thanks to Brawley’s trio of handlers that included Reverend Al Sharpton and attorneys C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox. In fact, the Brawley case propelled Sharpton to national prominence.
A grand jury investigation, with which Brawley and her team did not cooperate, dealt a crushing blow in late 1988 when it proclaimed in its findings, printed by the New York Times on October 7th, that “There was no medical or forensic evidence that a sexual assault was committed on Tawana Brawley.”
In essence, they found Brawley’s story to be untrue, a hoax even. Still, there are many who reject those conclusions and Brawley herself, even at a rare appearance in New York in December 1997 covered by the New York Times told a crowd, “They write that it didn’t happen, that it’s a hoax….Then why are they here? Why are you listening to a liar, if I lie? They know something happened, and they know who did it.”
What may or may not have happened to Brawley, however, doesn’t erase the fact that black women have long been victims of sex crimes. So much so that black women activists like Rosa Parks were among the many who spoke out and fought against it. Before that fateful day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on that bus in Montgomery, she, as Wayne State professor Danielle L. McGuire reveals in her important 2010 book, At the Dark End of the Street, which documents incidents of black women who were indeed abducted and raped in the South, had championed Recy Taylor.
Taylor, a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, was headed home following an evening service at Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama in 1944 when seven armed white men forced her into their vehicle and took her to a deserted grove of pecan trees where six of them raped her before leaving her on the side of a road. Rosa Parks was the NAACP representative who responded to the travesty in Abbeville.
It’s the Recy Taylors that lent so much credence to Brawley’s story. What may have seemed fanciful to a lot of white Americans was completely within the realm of belief for far too many black Americans.
The long historical record of sexual assault against black women by white men dating back to slavery is one of the primary reasons E.R. Shipp, a New York Times writer at the time who covered legal and was placed on the paper’s Brawley investigative team, believes that many black people so eagerly accepted Tawana Brawley’s story and, to this day, insist on its validity despite a grand jury’s findings.
Shipp, a black woman from Georgia, says that Brawley’s story resonated with many of her black supporters “because they knew of instances themselves or they had known stories that had been passed down of such outrage. It was more easily believable because of history but Tawana turned out to have been a flawed example of what had gone on throughout history when it comes to black women’s sexual assault and the willingness of the justice system to provide justice, to allow justice.”
Other factors in the Dutchess County area also helped make Brawley’s story viable, says Shipp, now a journalist in residence at the historically black Morgan State University in Baltimore. “It was believable in the Dutchess County area at the time because there had been some real racial unrest there, some of it connected to the fact that there were so many prisons being built in the area and…many of those new jobs were going to whites who had not had that much exposure to black people in their everyday world,” the Pulitzer Prize winner explains.
“All they were seeing were the population that was typical of who was coming to prison and they began apparently to treat blacks as if they were all criminals or suspects anyway so there was racial unrest already afoot in that area and there had been some activity of would-be KKK folk so all of those things came together to form a collective memory of these kinds of injustices over the years.”
Because 1988 was a presidential election year, with New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s name frequently raised as a potential contender, Shipp also thinks it was easier for Sharpton, Maddox and Mason to attract national attention, especially given the intense racial tensions of the time. Les Payne, another Pulitzer Prize winner who oversaw the coverage for Newsday, while reporting on the incident himself to reveal the holes in Brawley’s story, cites additional factors like New York City’s polarizing mayor, Ed Koch, and an all-out New York newspaper war over why the Brawley story attracted headlines for nearly a year.
“You had a very explosive, hot-tempered mayor, Mayor Koch,” says Payne. Plus, “there was a very hot newspaper war between the New York Post, the Daily News, the metro section of the New York Times and so there was a legitimate heated and hotly competed four paper battle for news and stories and primacy and I think that’s one of the things that fed [the Brawley story].”
Aside from placing a spotlight on sex crimes committed against black women, the intense coverage of the Brawley case also highlighted the media’s ongoing lack of diversity, says Payne.
“The media always has problems with black stories because they do not have sufficient black reporters. They do not have sufficient access,” explains Payne, a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists. “Many of the black reporters that they do have are distant themselves from what black history is about and what black current affairs are about.”
That was certainly evident in the Brawley case, with many news organizations gathering up not just their black reporters but also, according to Shipp, realizing the need for younger reporters as well. The culture was rapidly changing in the state of New York and across the country.
While the age-old atrocity of white men possibly raping a black woman and KKK activity were unfortunately not new, the Tawana Brawley story did shed light on new societal concerns around crack cocaine, the prison industrial complex and hip-hop culture. And, twenty five years later, those realities have not disappeared.
Still, Brawley’s story, whether one believes it or not, continues to raise very legitimate questions about the justice system that have come up time and time again with the O.J. Simpson trial and even now with the Trayvon Martin case.
“I guess Brawley maybe kind of paved the way for debate among blacks that became louder when the O.J. Simpson case emerged again challenging us to determine the credibility of the justice system and the ability of the justice system to treat fairly blacks who were victims of crimes and blacks who were the suspects in crime,” offers Shipp.
Twenty-five years later, Brawley’s story remains an important cultural marker that cannot be ignored.
“I think by negating her story or even by holding her up as the example of ‘oh you can’t trust a woman, you can’t trust a black woman who says she’s been raped by a white man,’” it deletes that whole history, that whole legacy that is at least a century old of white men assaulting and attacking black women with relative impunity,” says Wayne State professor Danielle L. McGuire.
Because, as history has shown, there have been Tawana Brawleys for whom the American justice system has not and continues not to serve.
And that’s why the Tawana Brawley story, flaws and all, will probably never go away.
Follow Ronda Racha Penrice on Twitter at @rondaracha