In 1989, a white woman was found naked and badly beaten in New York’s Central Park, where she’d been jogging. Five Black teenage boys were arrested and violently coerced into falsely confessing. The “Central Park Five” were then tried, convicted and imprisoned as adults.
Over 15 years later, DNA evidence and a confession from another person proved what the boys had always claimed – they were innocent. In 2014, the city settled with them for $41 million. Yet their saga continues.
False details about their case, including the lie that they had killed the jogger, continued to circulate. In 1989 Donald Trump spent over $80k in today’s value to take out a full page ad in the New York Times calling for their execution.
The Exonerated Five have fought back by living their lives, becoming parents and advocates, and entering politics. But now they’ve raised the stakes and filed a defamation suit against Trump for “stress, damage, and fear.”
White fetishes about Black criminality continue to haunt our communities and hurt us all, especially our youth. We must never rest until our stories are told correctly and until we see justice. It’s up to us. Our very future depends on it.