Category : Articles

Sub Category : Lifestyle

Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr., Kevin Richardson, Antron MCcray, and Korey Wise. Those five names are the names of what the world knows as the Central Park Five. On the night of  April 19,1989, a white woman jogging in central park was attacked and brutally raped. That same night, a group of teenage boys were hanging in Central park, but when the police showed up only a handful of the boys were grabbed. Three of the boys in question at the time were Raymond Santana Jr., Kevin Richardson, and eventually after finding out where he lived, Antron MCcray. Linda Farenstein decided to pin the rape on the young boys from the park and suddenly they were all suspects in a rape case. After making the police search every young boy of color on the streets of Harlem, Yusef Salaam was brought into questioning, while his friend Korey Wise went to help him for support. The police questioned Yusef, Kevin, Raymond, and Antron without an adult present and were physically forceful and tried to make the young boys pin different things on each other. The reason this worked was because the Police stated that if they all cooperated they could go home. Korey Wise was the last to be questioned and he wasn't supposed to be questioned in the first place. All five boys were found guilty and had to do between five to fourteen years in prison, starting with the Juvenile Detention Center. However, Korey Wise was sixteen years old and was sent straight to Rikers Island. 

This backstory was to provide a little detail to who the Central Park Five were. This review is based off of the Netflix Limited Series, When They See Us, by the amazing Ava Duvernay. Watching When They See Us from the very first episode, I was traumatized. Not in a relating to their experience way, but more of in a I have a younger brother this age right now and this hurts to watch kind of way. But it was important to watch because I was not around when the Central Park Five Case was taking place and I honestly did not know anything about it before the Netflix series came out. The reason being is that I had never heard of it, no one told me about it or really even talked about it. Before I watched the first episode all I knew was the year that it took place, that there were five boys of color involved, and that they were wrongfully accused. And if we are being honest, that is all that I really needed to know in order for my attention to be grabbed enough to decide to watch the series. Simply because of the fact that that same situation is unfortunately still happening to minorities this very day. It is a cause that I am very passionate about, not just because I am an African-American woman living in America, but because I am an African-American woman living in America with a sixteen year old brother who could easily "fit the description". 

The criminal justice system has fought against black and brown people for as long as I can remember, and even before. The earliest that I heard about the government versus black and latinx communities, was the civil rights movement. After that it was the Black Panther Party, and then the Hip-Hop community, and so on and so forth. People have protested, lost their lives, written, sung, and prayed to end this inequality that we face. When They See Us may have been painful for a lot of us, whether they experienced that kind of pain firsthand or are just simply able to relate to the pain and suffering that we have been dealing with, and our ancestors have been dealing with, for centuries.