The Journal of History     Winter 2003     TABLE OF CONTENTS
Myth Breakers  
 
 
Part 1 of 2
 
 

Alcohol is far more damaging to the fetus than is cocaine; so are cigarettes.  While only 2.5% of U.S. newborns have some prenatal exposure to cocaine, 73% have some prenatal exposure to alcohol and  38% to cigarettes.
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Thirteen years ago, a 15 year-old black child was brutally raped by a gang of white thugs in an upstate New York village. Her assailants wrote across her chest the epithet, "Black Bitch," smeared dog feces on her hair and face, put her into a plastic bag, and dumped her beside a Dumpster outside her apartment complex. Her name is Tawana Brawley. Today, she is a successful registered nurse, living in the Washington, DC area.

In the interim, due to a massive campaign of media disinformation, the average American, regardless of race, believes that Tawana Brawley, together with the Reverend Al Sharpton, the Reverend C. Vernon Mason, and the finest litigator in the history of American law, Alton H. Maddox, perpetrated a foul hoax on the American public.

As a result of a trial, conducted before a kangaroo court in Poughkeepsie New York, Steven Pagones, who was accused by Maddox, Sharpton, and Mason, of involvement in the rape, was awarded damages against all three defendants in varying amounts. Messrs. Sharpton and Mason have arranged to pay the damages assessed against them. Alton Maddox, who refuses to bow to a manifestly unjust verdict, now faces imprisonment for contempt of court, unless he pays the amount of $95,000 to the person he proved, at the defamation trial, to have been intimately involved in the kidnapping and rape of Tawana Brawley. In a word, Alton Maddox has chosen imprisonment over the abandonment of principle.

Wealthy individuals, with their own reasons for preventing the imprisonment of one of the few black leaders in contemporary America who enjoys a legitimate black base, have quietly offered to pay the $95,000 to Pagones. As a matter of principle, Alton refuses to accept their money. His insistence upon the necessity of an uncompromised black leadership in this nation prohibits the acceptance of the money for the purpose for which it is intended.

In my capacity as a fellow lawyer and close friend of Alton, I called him a few days ago to discuss an honorable solution to the current dilemma. Alton will not accept the money to pay Pagones; the non-payment of the money will land him in jail; the imprisonment of Alton Maddox could lead, without a doubt, to race riots in the City of New York and provide the excuse for the slaughter of untold numbers of outraged black supporters of a great black intellectual/activist/leader.

After a lengthy discussion of the dilemma, I asked Alton if he would be amenable to the following compromise:

In order to perfect the appeal in the case of Pagones v. Brawley, et. al., Alton is required to post a bond in the amount of the judgment rendered against him, i.e., $95,000. The posting of the bond automatically stays the contempt proceeding until the decision on the appeal is rendered by the Appellate Division. An additional amount of $100,000 will be required for the purchase of the trial transcript. Based upon the law, as you will observe from the attached documents, there is hardly a possibility that a rational court could do anything other than overturn the verdict of the jury. Without elaborating, but to provide you with an example of the absurdity of the verdict, in the case of Alton Maddox, the jury made a finding of fact that Alton Maddox uttered no statement, of and concerning the plaintiff, Pagones, that was defamatory. When they informed the judge that they had made that finding, the judge immediately ordered the sequestration of the jury, whereupon, they dutifully found that Alton should pay $95,000 to Pagones for statements made about the conduct of persons other than the plaintiff (Pagones) in the matter.

Volumes have been written regarding the miscarriage of justice in this case. In the attached documents, you will read the entire story of the rape and subsequent cover-up of the rape of a black child in upstate New York by a gang of white thugs, one of whom, Harry Crist, died of a gunshot wound to the head within two days of the rape of Tawana Brawley and whose death was presented to a grand jury as a suicide by a forensic pathologist who did not perform the autopsy and whose testimony before the grand jury was contradicted at trial by the pathologist who conducted the autopsy. The autopsy report did not list suicide as the cause of death for a very obvious reason; no weapon was found at the scene and there were no gunpowder traces on the hands of the deceased. The autopsy report listed homicide as the cause of the death of Harry Crist.

In a just society, the judge in this case would have ruled in favor of the defendants, notwithstanding the verdict of the jury. As the judge was a willing accomplice in the cover-up of the rape, he chose not to act according to law, but rather, according to the orders of a corrupt cabal of politicians, who, for very good reasons of their own, seek the marginalization and destruction of a legitimate leader of the black masses in the giant metropolis that calls itself New York.

What are the most obvious of those reasons? The answer lies in the astounding legal acumen of Alton H. Maddox, Jr. Before Robert Abrams and Mario Cuomo conspired to suspend him from the practice of law for nine years (unprecedented in the annals of New York law) for refusing to compromise his client's right to the exercise of the attorney-client privilege, Alton had provoked the bitter enmity of the entire law enforcement apparatus of the State of New York. The source of the enmity was his uncanny ability to win verdicts for black defendants in cases theretofore deemed "open and shut" against the defendant. In case after case, jury after jury of all racial and ethnic persuasions was finding, consistently, that the prosecution had not proved the guilt of the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. In the most celebrated of the cases tried by Alton H. Maddox for the defense, a jury of his peers acquitted the Reverend Alfred Sharpton of sixty-seven counts of income tax evasion and fraud. It is in the middle of this multi-month trial that Cuomo and Abrams made the decision to banish Alton Maddox from the courtrooms of the State of New York. The State could no longer support the reduction of their best prosecutors to the level of well dressed buffoons fumbling and stumbling in the presence of a superior intellect and master of the fine art of litigation.

Since his suspension ten years ago, Alton Maddox has established the United African Movement as the largest and most effective mass organization of black people in the State of New York and, possibly, in the nation. In addition to its ability to produce, within a matter of minutes, the presence of thousands of black people on the streets of New York and other cities along the eastern seaboard, the United African Movement, since its inception, has served as the premiere instrument of African mass education in the United States. Every Wednesday night, without interruption, a major black scholar/intellectual/activist (with the possible exception of the undersigned who, for some bizarre and inexplicable reason, has been known to befoul its pristine record from time to time) holds forth from the platform of the United African Movement, before a vast audience of black people whose level of intellectual sophistication presents a major challenge to even the most accomplished intellectuals of our time. The Wednesday night meetings, of the United African Movement in Harlem, constitute a university without walls for the people of the New York metropolitan area.

It is precisely because of the spirit of racial independence that has informed the financing of this weekly seminar in the pathology of racism and the history of our people that Alton cannot now consider the acceptance of "alien" funds to pay an unjust judgment nor to provide the funds for an appeal bond.

Louis Clayton Jones


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The Journal of History - Winter 2003 Copyright © 2003 by News Source, Inc.