Not Rated (but would get an R for language)
Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon
ON DEMAND NOW. IN PA THEATERS 11/14/12.
Racism will always be around. I'm not being a pessimist. I'm being a realist. Many people think that we've annihilated racism since Martin Luther King Jr. was around. Of course, black people have had tons more success since than (just look at Hollywood. How many black actors have won Oscars in the past two decades?) but racism is still a common part of life. Statistics show, for example, that schools are more segregated than they were in King's days. This isn't institutional discrimination where racism is socially accepted and lynching is a daily activity, but individual racism. White people see towns that are majority nonwhite and don't send their kids there. In the back of their minds they're threatened by blacks and other nonwhites. This can't be ignored. Historian/filmmaker Ken Burns, who made an extraordinary epic about the Civil War in 1990, has made a terrific documentary about the never-ending life of racism in The Central Park Five, a true story about a city's refusal to apology for arresting five teenage nonwhite boys for the rape of a white woman.
Co-directed by Ken's daughter Sarah and her husband David McMahon, The Central Park Five could have easily debuted on PBS or The History Channel, but that's not enough. People need to see this on the big screen to feel its impact. It has the usual archive footage and interviews with the incarcerators and their friends/relatives, but in a Ken Burns film the history lesson feels so much more passionate than the traditional programs on TV. The movie is about the Central Park Jogger case of 1989. On April 19th of that year a 29 year old woman named Trisha Meili decided to go jogging in New York's iconic park at night. At the same time an activity known as "wilding" was going on in and around the park. This is when gangs of young men (presumably all nonwhite) would get together and run around and assault/rob anyone they saw. Early morning the next day Trisha was found beaten to a pulp in the park. She was put in a coma. Doctors discovered that she had also been raped the night before.
Five teenagers, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Kharey Wise, were arrested and charged with the assault. There was no DNA evidence of the five on Trisha's clothing. The boys were only taken in because they had been out the night of the crime and had apparently participated in the "wilding." They tried to explain to the cops that they didn't attack the woman, but they didn't listen. Instead, they just yelled and interrogated them in the precinct, certain that the teenagers were guilty. The boys were each set aside and told to confess to the crime on camera. Each was told that if they did that then they'd be let go. Why would the boys agree to do this? Well, they didn't have a choice, their parents weren't allowed to help, and they were 14-16 years old. What else could they do? Even though there was no physical evidence that they'd done the crime their confessions were enough, and all five of them were sent to jail.
Then in 2002, Matias Reyes, an inmate known as the East Side Rapist, confessed to the crime. His DNA matched the prints on Trisha's clothing and the boys were let go. WOW. Five innocent boys sent to jail for a little over ten years for a horrible crime they didn't commit? This is a mistake that the New York Supreme Court continues to ignore to this day. This sounds like racism, if you ask me. Where was the evidence? Where was the freedom of speech? Why is it that five teenage black boys were not allowed to explain what happened? If the "rapists" were white, would they have not been allowed to speak the truth as well? There's an intriguing scene in the movie where Burns shows us that another rape had happened in the city at the time. A woman was raped and then thrown off the roof of a building and killed. Why wasn't this in the news? Because the rapist and the victim were both black. The Central Park Five stays with you long after it's finished. We may think that institutional discrimination is in the past, but it still pops up every now and then.
For example, New York still hasn't issued a public apology for the boys' arrests.
