Scholar-activist Angela Davis once wrote, “The ideological space for the proliferation of this racialized fear of crime has been opened by the transformation in international politics created by the fall of the European socialist countries. Communism is no longer the quintessential enemy against which the nation imagines its identity. This space is now inhabited by ideological constructions of crime, drugs, immigration, and welfare. Of course, the enemy within is far more dangerous than the enemy without, and a Black enemy within is the most dangerous of all,” she wrote.
There was, without doubt, a wild and horrific crime committed against a young woman in the green depths of New York City’s Central Park in the cool nights of 1989. But she wasn’t the only person against whom a crime was committed. Five young boys–Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Antron McCray–were each and all victimized by a police, prosecutorial, and judicial system that saw them merely as the racist, rampaging media was projecting them, and treated them like aliens in the midst of what philosophers like to boast about; the so-called social contract. They were hustled into court, provided with defense counsel that is barely more than a presence, like most poor folks in the nation, and given what was little more than a proverbial bum’s rush.
In the days following the Central Park rape, and in the same period of the trial, a prominent New York City financial and real estate tycoon, Donald Trump, took out full-page ads in city papers lamenting that these animals could not receive the death penalty. The boys were duly bum-rushed into the gulags of New York upstate prison hell holes, where they were tagged with that worst of all tags, rapist. In prison culture, there are few epithets that are more deadly. The only one seen as worse is perhaps baby raper. These youngsters endured almost, and for some, over a decade of such horrific conditions.
And they faced another hell when they came time for an elusive false freedom, in a city where their names were anathema. As they suffered, so their mother suffered. And as they recently wrote to the head DA, “We’ve suffered for 13 years, but it seems like an eternity. While the so-called justice system refused to hear our laments, or even objectively review our many legal concerns regarding the many improprieties that we perceive to be evident in this case, it has been our hope, although not our belief, that we would be treated fairly and democratically, given the confession of Matthias Reyes and the forensic verification validating his admissions”. The mothers of the Central Park Five have endured the unendurable as their boys were swallowed up into the gulag and emerged with permanent scars upon their very souls. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for Prison Radio.