I was perusing (or I might’ve been stalking) through some of my peer’s blogs today and just like Hannah Andrews, I too, was moved by the SBS documentary, ‘The Central Park Five’ that was aired on TV the other night.
The power of the documentary lies in the breadth of knowledge, passion, truth and grit- addressing issues of race and miscarriage of justice through the story of five innocent men who were wrongly accused of rape and murder solely due society’s struggle of racial acceptance… A travesty!
Sarah Burns, author of ‘The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding’, puts it best when she wrote, “These young men were convicted long before the trial, by a city blinded by fear and, equally, freighted by race. They were convicted because it was all too easy for people to see them as violent criminals simply because of the colour of their skin.”
What struck a chord with me in particular were the documentary’s concluding remarks by historian, Professor Craig Wilder, articulating that the freedom of the five men never got as much attention as their conviction did.
“I want us to remember what happened that day and to be horrified by ourselves… We falsely convicted them and we walked away from our crime…”
Ultimately, Wilder purports that we are all guilty in the vilification of five innocent boys who were wrongly accused of the rape and murder of a white woman all those years ago. We allowed the media to invade upon what should have been a private case. We rushed to place judgement upon these boys. We are at fault for the incarceration of five beautiful young men who had their youth, their faith and their dignity taken away from them. Where is our sentence?
If anything, this documentary not only raises issues of justice and race, but also questions our own personal, deep-rooted prejudices. A definite must see!