Twenty years ago, a black, 15- year-old girl named Tawana Brawley was found in a garbage bag near her Wappingers Falls, N.Y., home. She claimed she'd been abducted, raped and sodomized by six white men over a period of four days, some of them local police officers. The details of the case were sufficiently lurid to guarantee the case became a national sensation. Her body was smeared with feces. Racist slurs had been written on her torso. And her clothing was torn and burned. The case seemed like something out of the KKK era. Reverend Al Sharpton, then merely an...