THE EXONERATED FIVE’s REDEMPTION SONG
One night in 2015, Ava DuVernay, the activist and filmmaker behind Selma and 13th, came across a reply buried in her Twitter feed:
What’s your next film gonna be on? #thecentralparkfive maybe????
The tweet came from Raymond Santana Jr., one of five Harlem teenagers wrongly convicted in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case. DuVernay went on to ask Santana, Dr. Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise, and Antron McCray to entrust her with the story of the so-called “Central Park Five”—now “the Exonerated Five.”
In the spring of 2019, thirty years after their dubious arrests, Town & Country dispatched Feature Well co-founder Alex Bhattacharji to write a cover story on DuVernay and the Five timed to their four-part Netflix series When They See Us.
For Alex, who witnessed police bias and misconduct growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, speaking with Santana, Salaam, Richardson, Wise, and McCray was essential. “It was important to listen and see them as real people, not just social justice symbols,” he says.“There were six victims of the attack that night. And the dehumanizing injustice done to the Five—that was perpetrated by a mob of millions.” Prominent among them: Donald Trump, who took out a full-page ad calling for bringing back the death penalty for the Five, all teens, before any were tried in court.
Years later, after another man confessed to the crime (confirmed by DNA evidence) and their convictions were vacated, the Five won a civil judgment that felt like a hollow victory at best. “There’s no amount of money that will equal what we endured,” Richardson said. “We have these scars that nobody sees.”
The series’ title speaks to what police and the power structures do see—skin color—and the dangerous assumptions they make about young brown and Black men. “They were picked up for just being boys,” DuVernay said. “Just like Brett Kavanaugh. Just like the white kids who party on spring break and are never called gangs.”
For DuVernay, who founded the collective Array, the storytelling process was both traumatic and therapeutic. “I usually don’t cry at my own work,” she said, “but when I got to the end of episode four, I cried like a baby. The cumulative emotion broke me down in a way that was unlike anything I’ve done.”
“I cried and cried when I found out [we were exonerated],” McCray said. “I cried for what I’d lost. My father died never knowing that the truth came out.”
His and the Five’s truth speaks to a larger one: “This is something we allowed to happen,” DuVernay said, a year before George Floyd’s murder. “And it’s not just happening to them. It’s happening to so many people.”
You can read it HERE.
