Word: brawley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...illusion of the giant rat of Sumatra appeared in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., last November. In the telling of the tale, the rat took the form of six white men, one wearing a badge, who carried Tawana Brawley into the dark woods and held her for four days and raped her and chopped her hair and wrote KKK and NIGGER on her body and smeared dog feces on her and left her in a plastic garbage bag just behind the apartment where her family had lived until two weeks earlier...
...terrible story. Many embraced it. They even luxuriated in the outrage of it. The saga was extravagantly awful. Brawley is black and at the time of her disappearance was 15 years old. The old story: strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree, the night riders in sheets come North now. Was hers not the primal American tale of violated black innocence, of white bigotry that wears a badge and goes unpunished? Did it not reverberate with all the horrors of America's original sin? Did it not recapitulate, precisely, the original drama of abduction and violation that brought black Africans...
...that the Brawley case should run in historical parallel to the political progress of Jesse Jackson. Any American with a memory watched in astonishment this spring as thousands of white Americans, blue-collar workers among them, an old reliable class of Wallaceites, took Jackson as their leader. Is there some buried law of collective psychological compensation requiring that each burst of light must be answered by a burst of darkness? That the Jackson victories must have the balancing underhorror of the Brawley rape...
McKinnon told the Daily News that he quit his job as Sharpton's aide five weeks ago because he could not "live with all those lies" the Brawley advisers were concocting. Interviewed later on New York's WCBS-TV, he repeated his charges while hooked up to a lie detector. The polygraph, said the operator, indicated that McKinnon was telling the truth. According to McKinnon, the Brawley advisers did not really believe her story of abduction and rape. He said that when he personally offered to investigate, they showed no interest. "I don't care about no facts," he quoted...
Governor Mario Cuomo had said earlier that the allegations against the three Brawley advisers demanded a "whole new look at the situation." In a strongly worded letter to the attorney general, Cuomo warned that the judicial process could not be "deliberately and contemptuously violated." Meanwhile, U.S. investigators began probing to see whether Sharpton, Maddox and Mason had committed any federal offense while raising funds by mail. As for Brawley, currently living quietly in Monticello, N.Y., how she came to be found last November, wrapped in a plastic bag and covered with scrawled racial epithets, remained a mystery...