Five boys happened to be in some corner of an 843 acre park when a white woman got raped in the same park. The five teens who had nothing to do with the crime are charged with it. Black kids. White women. We know it is an explosive combo, or else Emmett Till would have lived, right? Thankfully the white lady lived.
A blonde millionaire business man takes out ads in major newspapers calling for the return of death penalty to punish the kids. He must have been thinking that it should be obvious to (white) people that black teens get off by raping white women. It was the universal truth first discovered by KKK in the South. But this was not the South, this was the North, the promised land to which the slaves took the underground railway to escape persecution and lynching. This was New York City. The year was 1989. This happened after Michael Jackson had turned the world on its head with Thriller. Thurgood Marshall, the first black American Supreme court judge was already in the office for almost quarter century and there had already been four African American astronauts in space.
But more things change, more they stay the same. Your biases and prejudices just grow old with you. Maybe they fade out from public view, maybe they are less pronounced, but make no mistake they are still there. What happened to group of five kids christened Central Park Five was a catastrophic failure of the American justice system. No other case in the recent history highlights how the biases and prejudices of the U.S legal system works against the young people of color.
I watched Sarah (daughter of Ken Burns) and Ken Burns' documentary on Amazon Prime called The Central Park Five after I tried watching Ava DuVernay's Netflix biopic series based on the same event, When They See Us. Ken Burns' documentary is faster and it delivers justice to the boys in about 100 minutes. It has media footage and the film makers made the film after the ultimate exoneration of the five in 2002, wanting to make the miscarriage of justice public and to help the wrongful conviction case the Five filed against New York City.
When They See Us on the other hand is incredibly more
traumatic to see, especially the first few episodes. I cannot imagine what those innocent kids went through - first prosecuted for a crime they didn't commit and then charged and incarcerated for a major part of their young lives. The biopic delves in the lives of the kids before the event that turned their lives upside down, their time in the prison or juvie and their lives as adults after they come out of prison. No one but Ava Duvarney could direct such a powerful series.
In this era of Black Lives Matter, it is all the more important to watch these accounts of black people (or people of color, one of the five was a Latino kid), to understand how they are treated differently by the law and order machinery. While being at the wrong place at the wrong time does not work in favor of anyone, but if you are the wrong color too - that seals your fate, for the worse.
These are the Exonerated Five - Antron McCray, Raymond Santana
Jr, Kevin Washington, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise. All the men have contributed and assist the Innocence Project whose mission is to help exonerate individuals wrongfully convicted through DNA testing. Here below are the Exonerated Five, at the screening of When They See Us, in 2019.
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