Yusef Salaam, one of the so-called Central Park Five—himself, Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana—accepting the inaugural Roger Baldwin Courage Award, for the group and for director Ava DuVernay, whose Netflix series When They See Us retold their decades-long legal battle over being accused of a gang rape:
“I am one of the Exonerated Five. After decades of being known as the Central Park Five, we thank Ava for acknowledging our humanity and telling our story with honesty and factual representation. We had to struggle to break the label that the media gave us. We stumbled forward, falling on our face at times. [But] Korey [Wise] said it so well. He said, when Donald _____ took out that full-page ad, and put them in all of New York City’s newspapers, calling for our execution, he placed a bounty on our head. They had published our names, our phone numbers, and our addresses in New York City’s newspapers. Imagine the horror of that. Just step backwards once, to the 1950s—we would become modern-day Emmett Tills. It was almost as if they were trying to find someone from the darkest enclaves of society to come into our homes, drag us from our beds, and hang us from trees in Central Park. [He begins to weep] I’m not ashamed to cry in front of you. These are tears of pain. These are tears of joy. We are the heroes of this story.”
The five men were arrested as teenagers, falsely convicted, sentenced to years in prison, and eventually exonerated for the rape and assault of a white jogger in Central Park in 1989, They endured the name-calling by playboy real estate developer who bought full-page newspaper ads with the headline:
“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.”
They endured being called a “wolf pack” and of having Pat Buchanan insist that if only “the eldest of that wolf pack were tried, convicted and hanged in Central Park, by June 1, and the 13- and 14-year-olds were stripped, horsewhipped, and sent to prison, the park might soon be safe again for women.”
And.They.Were.Innocent.
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