In an attempt to point out striking similarities between the treatment of suspects in the Taylor and Brawley cases, Mason frettingly insinuated that Brawley, too, had identified her attackers. Maddox was a self-anointed Black rage translator. On this solemn morning, he referenced from the pulpit the story of “Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old African American sister who was gang-raped by white men in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944, while coming from church.” He added, “D espite hearing the men’s confessions, two juries refused to indict them for their crimes.” He reminded the audience that it was Rosa Parks, then an NAACP investigator (and future mother of the Civil Rights Movement), who launched a national campaign to protest “this miscarriage of justice,” with support from prominent Black thought leaders W.E.B. Disbarred for professional misconduct (not related to the Brawley affair and now referred to by the title the Reverend Dr. Vernon Mason, who shares the invidious notoriety, along with Maddox and the reverend Al Sharpton, of parroting Brawley’s story of racist rape, refusing to drag her before a grand jury, and assisting her in becoming a fugitive from justice. Maddox died on April 23 at age 77, from a fall in a nursing home i n the Bronx.Īmong the most ardent promoters of this posthumous would-be redemption was Yusef Salaam, one of “the Exonerated Five,” who said that had his defense been left up to Maddox (who’d successfully sprung Michael Briscoe, one of seven original suspects, without even going to trial), he might have been acquitted.Īnd the rest would have been history, stressed former attorney C. Such was the restorative hope that some mourners held out for Maddox as well, during homegoing eulogies at his funeral, on May 1, in the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.
Twenty-five years of combined multiple prison sentences later, those five young men were found to be innocent and set free. That, they will say, is his shameful and lasting legacy, bar none.īut this longstand ing badmouthing of Maddox may yet be relegated to the trash heap of history, as was the case of the five Black boys who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989.
Maddox Jr., his most rabid c r itics will accuse him of masterminding the assailable late 1980s hoax that 15-year-old Tawana Brawley was gang-raped by white men and left to die in a garbage bag of feces.
When the history books are written about confrontational African American defense attorney Alton H. Author, left, and Maddox, circa 1985: How will a seminal leader of the Black protest movement be remembered? Wilford Harewood
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