In 1989, five Black and Hispanic teens were falsely accused of raping and nearly killing a white woman jogging in Central Park. The five became collectively known as the Central Park Five and were ultimately exonerated in 2002. Yahoo News spoke with two of the five exonerated men, Kevin Richardson and Dr. Yusef Salaam, as they look at current day events with the police killings of unarmed Black people and whether or not things have really changed regarding law enforcement or racism over the past 30 years.
KEVIN RICHARDSON: April 19, 1989, I was 14 years old at the time, and I went into the park that day just basically curious. Just wanted to hang out with the guys that I saw, and I wind up coming home seven years later.
YUSEF SALAAM: We were known back in 1989 as Central Park Five. It took 13 years for the truth to come out.
– All of the defendants gave videotaped statements to police implicating themselves or others, but some of their attorneys charged today that police obtained the confessions by force.
YUSEF SALAAM: In those 13 years, we were in prison or trying to regain our footing in a world that had seen us as guilty, had already basically looked at us as being part of the throwaway part of society, the scum of the earth, if you will.
KEVIN RICHARDSON: It’s something that we went through being blamed for something we didn’t do. It still haunts us to this day.
– Some members of the black community charged the arrests are a racially motivated rush to judgment.
– Was it about somebody racially targeting and profiling an African-American man?
YUSEF SALAAM: When I look at current day events–
GEORGE FLOYD: [GASPING FOR AIR]
YUSEF SALAAM: –I can’t help but think about tragedies that I was made aware of going through my own personal event. We became almost a modern-day Emmett Tills when you look at what Donald Trump placed in the papers two weeks after we were accused of– of this horrific crime. This is the ad that ran in New York City’s newspapers in 1989. This is the ad that was running and signed by Donald Trump himself.
The system is wrong period:
Redemption in art:
