- We wanted to thank everyone so much
for coming this evening.
We are really excited to be hosting this
panel discussion tonight on Race
and the Criminal Justice System,
the Central Park Five.
In attendance tonight, we have Yusef Salaam,
one of the exonerated members of
the Central Park Five, we have Sarah Burns,
writer, director, and producer of the documentary film,
the Central Park Five, Dr. Christopher Tinson,
local assistant professor at Hampshire College,
who engages in research and advocacy
in race and the criminal justice system,
and our panel facilitator is Mary Gannon,
educator and activist in the field of social justice.
Both Liz and I became involved in bringing
this discussion to Smith from different places,
but our collaboration has been a wonderful source
of inspiration for me, in particular in seeing
how community comes together to create change.
As part of my community practice project
this year, one of our tasks was to go watch
the documentary film, The Central Park Five.
After watching it, I felt overwhelmed
by what I had witnessed, and felt
everyone I knew, every social work school,
everyone, everywhere should see this film.
There was so many gross issues of injustice at play,
I did not know how to process what I had watched.
I was hoping that by bringing the film to Smith,
the community here would engage
in conversation and help me gain a better awareness
of what had happened, along with what actions
I could take next.
- We both wanted to give our sort of reasons
and perspective as to why we tried to,
or we have made this happen on campus,
which is very exciting.
(laughing)
I watched this film in November
when it was on PBS, and I reflected on
a class that I had taken with Sarah Burns in college,
which was called Politics of the American Color Line,
and I remember her talking about the case
and that she was writing her thesis about
the Central Park Five, and this was in 2003, 2004.
And watching the film in 2012 and seeing
how much work and effort clearly, and thought
was put into this film, I was so excited for her
and impressed that, really stuck with it
as long as you did and I'm excited
to hear more about what's motivated you.
But then of course, I thought a lot about
Smith, and during my Dismantling
Institutional Racism class this past year,
Sarah Burns and The Central Park Five
was brought up as a film that really illustrates
the injustices of the criminal justice system
and the endemic racism that the film
so clearly shows as a powerful force
behind the convictions, and also for the reason
of the lack of media attention once these men
were exonerated.
I applied to Smith largely because of its commitment
to anti-racism, embedded in its mission.
And it's been a privilege to work with Ruth
and everyone, Mary, and all of you here today,
to really bring all these collaborators together
and bring yet another, just another one
of the conversations of hopefully
many, many, many that we have about racism
and anti-racism work, and I hope that
it's aligned with the mission but also
expands and pushes our conversation today.
Lastly, we would not be here without
the collaboration of many, many student organizations
and of course, the Smith College School for Social Work
faculty and staff,
as well as The Innocence Project and
Florentine Films.
The student organizations on campus have helped
with screenings, they've helped with
all sorts of different things, and also
just generous donations.
The Jewish Student Alliance, Disability Awareness Group,
Gender and Sexuality Alliance,
Men at Smith, Council for Students of Color,
and Social Welfare Action Alliance,
and of course all of you.
I mean I think it's really awesome to show up
and you are here, and that is wonderful,
and we are excited to move forward
and see what we learn and can ask
and grow from today.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Hey everybody.
I'm not used to being behind the podium.
So, this might be a little awkward.
So good evening, really honored to be
part of this conversation tonight.
Certainly, part of the work as an instructor
is to support students and continuing
to figure out how to bring issues
of race and racism to the forefront
of our work here at the Smith College
School for Social Work.
So just for a minute, I want to really
acknowledge Liz and Ruth for their efforts
and for this example of really engaging
in collective action.
When I think about the Dismantling
Institutional Racism course, which I've been
really fortunate to teach now for several years
with my colleague Mike Funk, who couldn't
be with us tonight, part of the mission of that course
is to really support students in thinking about
how to take the action, and so I see this
as a real example of that.
So if we could just give Liz and Ruth
a round of applause for that.
(applause)
It's also, just as a shout-out to those faculty,
it's always nice when you see your students
do what you ask them to do.
So, thank you.
So, this story of the Central Park Five
is a story that is as old as this country.
It was 1619 I think, when the first
African slaves arrived in the United States,
and so the span of the history of the United States
shows us the same themes, dilemmas and questions
of race, class, issues of justice, freedom,
and the impact of powerful social institutions
like the media.
This story, from my observations of it
many times now and also looking at the clips,
it really strikes me as another example
for the countless stories of excessive
and undeserved incarceration of men of color
over the history of the United States,
and I'm sure tonight we'll be hearing
and talking about some of those other examples.
What I want to share is just a few thoughts
in the intention for this event.
One of the ways that I frame anti-racism work,
and for those of you that have been a student of mine,
this may sound familiar, is we talk a lot about
locating the head and the heart.
And I think, you know when Liz and Ruth
and I spoke about this, we felt as,
alongside of it being very important
to have an analysis of institutional racism
and really look at the web of institutional racism.
We also feel like it's really important
to hold the experience of emotions and affect
that go alongside of doing this work.
And so what we, and at the same time,
we talked about this a little bit as well,
is that we also don't want to feel immobilized
or to feel that we are stuck around
how those emotions impact us.
And so as Liz and Ruth both said earlier
in their introduction, one of the goals
for tonight is to really think about
how we identify concrete actions
that each of us can engage in personally
and professionally, individually
and institutionally.
I know for many of you third-years
that are heading out into your professional lives,
and those of you also that will be in placement,
these are some of the challenges and dilemmas
that you face as practitioners.
And so I think we really want to talk about that
at length tonight and make that
one of the focus of the conversation.
I just want to share a little bit.
Recently, I have a colleague up at
the University of Vermont who's a professor
in geography, his name's Rashad Shivaz,
and he was interviewed on Vermont Public Radio.
I'm from the North Country, so, yes
we do talk about these issues up there
in the North Country.
And he was asked to come on to the radio
and speak about his reaction to
the Trayvon Martin case.
And in his comments, he referenced
James Baldwin's essay, The Devil Finds Work,
which I would encourage you to take
a look at if and when you have some time.
And he talked about this essay
in terms of some of his observations
about the current state of race and racism in the US.
And I want to read you the quote
that he also quoted in his commentary.
The quote is from The Devil Finds Work.
"White Americans have been encouraged
to continue dreaming, and black Americans
have been alerted to the necessity of waking up."
And so when I think about that,
I think Baldwin is speaking directly
about the way in which he was perceiving
race and the way it functions in the United States,
and interesting how if he were alive now,
he would see probably many of the same observations.
And so this idea that whiteness is a dream stage
while black folks are awake, and have to remain awake.
And so I share this with you because I think
we all have work to do around these issues,
across racial ethnic groups, and if we talk about
social justice, we talk about class,
we talk about heterosexism and homophobia,
we talk about sexism, domestic violence ability,
so there's lots of issues.
I feel at times that what is often missing
is a real clear focus on issues of race and racism.
And so I do think in my work as
a white anti-racism educator that there is
a point where those of us who identify as white
need to think about whether we're
living in that dream state which allows us
to in many ways stay in that state of denial
that plays a part in how race plays a part in our lives.
And so I think also that this call
for waking up can also be very liberatory,
and I think it could open us up to
a larger sense of humanity, and also
help us engage in anti-racism work in productive ways.
So I just wanted to share that with you.
I think, like I said, we all have
a part in this, but when I really think
about my work as a white person
engaged in anti-racism work, I was just
struck by Baldwin's thoughts.
So our hope tonight is that we are
making space here for a healing
and liberatory process, while we're
also creating strategies for individual and systemic change.
So what we want to do now is show
about a 12 or 13-minute clip from the film,
and we're aware that many of you
may have seen the film already and thought
in case folks hadn't, we want to just
set a context for the story of
the Central Park Five and where it took place.
So we're going to show that clip and then
we'll get to discussion.
(distant sirens and horns honking)
(mellow music)
- [Voiceover] I showed her the top of the entrance
in the direction she came by.
I showed her when she made the turn.
I showed her where I picked up the tree branch.
And down the road where I struck her there
with the tree branch and where I dragged her in.
She just kept moaning, you know,
and said, "Stop," and grabbed my head,
she was in pain and all that, you know.
She was bleeding.
I can't explain to you what happened
after I left there the park that night,
but I can guarantee you that there was
no way these kids saw this woman come in,
or had a idea the way she was coming from.
I'm the one that did this.
(police radio)
- [Voiceover] Ready?
- [Voiceover] Yeah.
- Approximately 1:30 this morning, two males
walking through Central Park north of the 102nd street
jogging path found a female.
She was still alive, and in fact still is alive.
The female was clad only in a bra.
She was lying exposed in the area,
appeared to have been exposed for a couple of hours.
Her body temperature was down very low.
Around her mouth was an article of clothing
that was wrapped around her face,
and the same article was used to bind
her wrists to her face.
She had been struck around the head
repeatedly, and mud on her body.
She appears to have been dragged
through the woods north into the shrub area.
She was taken to Metropolitan Hospital
where she's classified as in serious condition.
(dramatic music)
- [Voiceover] I look back at the jogger case
and wish I had been more skeptical as a journalist.
You know, a lot of people didn't do their jobs.
Lawyers, police, prosecutors, defense lawyers.
This was a proxy war being fought.
And these young men were the proxies
for all kinds of other agendas.
And the truth and reality and justice were not part of it.
- [Voiceover] You give us 22 minutes.
- [Voiceover] --fight back against--
- Polls are galloping--
- [Voiceover] Do you have a passport, Mr. Gotti?
- Given the alarming spread of AIDS--
(crowd talking)
- You don't like it, you're fired!
- [Voiceover] A savage racial attack in the
middle class neighborhood of Howard Beach--
- A mob of whites attacked three black men--
- [Voiceover] The mayor of New York called it
a racial lynching.
(yelling)
- New York, under-policed city with crime out of control.
- The criminal justice system isn't working.
- They call him the Subway Vigilante.
- [Voiceover] Goetz, ran over to one of his wounded victims
and said, "You don't look too bad, here's another."
- If I had more bullets, I would have shot 'em all
again and again.
- It's about time someone stood up for himself.
- [Voiceover] 25-year-old Michael Stewart--
- [Voiceover] 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins--
- 67-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs lived, until police
came to evict her and ended up killing her.
- New York's now the capital of racial violence.
(loud chanting)
- You wanna use a gun, we'll use the gun!
- None of us is safe, even if you lock yourself
behind doors--
- [Voiceover] There's now a new level
of random violence in the city.
- [Voiceover] (unclear) and this city will
raise up in its wrath against those
who would perpetrate monstrosities.
(rap music)
- [Voiceover] Harlem, 1989.
My neighborhood is a small neighborhood.
When I was younger all the kids would say
this is the suburbs of Harlem.
It was like three different projects around my neighborhood.
Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam,
I didn't know them.
But I seen them a lot in my neighborhood.
- I lived in The Bronx at one time, and The Bronx
was more quiet-like, you know, even though
it was the projects.
It was very secluded; everybody knew each other.
When I moved to Harlem, Harlem was very fast-paced.
Everything moved fast.
The cars moved fast, the people, the lingo.
It was a big culture shock.
- [Voiceover] I was a only child.
Me and my mother, we was close,
but my father was my best friend.
I thought he was like a super hero.
He coached all my little league teams.
He was a great teacher.
I played short stop, I played pitcher.
In little league you get to play outfield, catcher,
but my favorite position was short stop.
(rap music)
- [Voiceover] My dad was from Puerto Rico,
my mother was a mix of Puerto Rican and black.
So my dad's like light-skinned Puerto Rican,
and my mother's side was more like dark-skinned.
You know so we had like, the best of both worlds.
- [Voiceover] I used to ride skateboards,
I used to play things like hide and go seek and
you know, used to run around with a lot of
people from the neighborhood.
- [Voiceover] As a kid, I knew Yusef and I must say
he was a good kid.
He had, him and his family had just moved in
to the Schomburg complex.
- [Voiceover] Well me and Yusef, we grew up
in the same building.
So, you know of course I seen them around
and our parents knew each other
from just day-to-day.
- [Voiceover] It was my mother, my sister and my brother.
And my mother was a single parent
teaching at Parsons University.
She encouraged all of us to do good work,
good quality work, whatever we did.
- [Voiceover] When I was a kid, had
a little hearing problem.
But I just found myself just ignoring it
to the point where it affected my life.
- I grew up with a big family.
A lot of women in my family; my mother plus four sisters.
- [Voiceover] He's the baby, and he was
treated as such and, you know, mama's only boy
out of five children and the baby.
So he was just our hearts' like, joy, everybody's.
- [Voiceover] At that time, I was just getting into music,
watching videos, MTV Raps was kinda big, so we watched that.
We would record the videos and we would
watch 'em over and over and over all day.
You know, my dad would come into the house say,
"You still watching that video from when I left?"
You know, that's how far my range was.
I think that I was at that point
of coming into who I was, you know,
but I never really, I really never really got there.
(upbeat music)
- New York in the late 1980s was
a completely schizophrenic, divided city.
It was enormous wealth gushing into the city
out of the rise of the financial industries,
which had surged beginning around 1980.
So the city that had been in a big collapse
for several decades had turned around.
But there was a whole side to the city
in which drug gangsters and crack and kind of
hard, permanently locked underclass was in place,
and there was enormous suffering.
It was as if there was a social moat
that divided these two New Yorks.
- The city, when I came, in was on the edge of bankruptcy
and people thought we would not recover.
- We were a city coming out of a series of crises.
Enormous economic crisis.
A school system that was in collapse.
Political institutions that seemed to be failing
the people and not meeting their needs.
Old fashionable, beautiful, noble neighborhoods
falling apart.
- And of course overriding was crime.
- Several things happened to me
that I just considered normal part
of living in New York City.
A couple of muggings and near-muggings
and I didn't even report any of these things.
Just kind of figured it's the way it is.
- People had it worked out in their heads
that their block was safe.
The streets they walked to get to the subway
to go to work, they were okay.
Their subway line, they got on the same spot
on the train every day. That was okay.
They had figured out a safe path
through this garden of terrors.
- And then in about '84, crack came to New York City
and had increased crime.
No question about it.
- [Voiceover] When the crack wars happened,
all of a sudden, teenagers had
lots of cash and guns, and all hell breaks loose
in Bedford-Stuyvesant, all hell breaks loose
in Harlem, all hell breaks loose in Brownsville
East New York.
We were supposed to be afraid.
It would have been irrational not to be afraid.
But the people who suffered most
with the rise of criminality, gang wars, drug wars,
were actually the people we blame.
Most of the homicides were young,
poor, working class black and brown kids.
And the dominant social message was,
no one cared if you lived or died.
- As far as I'm concerned, in the late 80s
in New York City, the black community was under assault.
The most endangered species in America,
that was a popular phrase, was the young, black man.
- Just so you have a sense of the flow
of the next hour and a half, we'll spend
time up here with some discussion questions
that I will be posing to my collaborators,
and I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about.
And then we want to leave time for Q&A with the audience.
So as you are listening to what people
are sharing and thinking about questions
that you might have, you know jot those down
and we'll have some time to do some Q&A.
It occurred to me that many folks might be
curious to know what brought Sarah Burns
to this piece, and so I thought, Sarah,
we might take a few minutes just to
have you talk a little bit about what drew you
to the story, what compelled you to create this.
- Thanks everyone for coming tonight.
In 1989 when this happened, I was six years old.
And so it was not, and I grew up about
an hour north of here in New Hampshire.
I was totally unaware of this case
at the time, it was not on my radar.
And so I learned about it for the first time
in the summer of 2003.
I was going into my senior year in college
and I got an internship working,
doing some research for a pair of
civil rights lawyers in New York,
and they were just getting involved
in and about to file the civil suit in this case.
So it was not long after the convictions had been vacated.
And that's how I learned about the case,
and I was majoring in American Studies
and concentrating on race, and I knew
I wanted to write my senior essay
about some kind of 20th century
African-American studies topic,
but I hadn't figured out what that would be.
And I was suddenly made aware of this story,
and was so drawn to it.
I met Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson
that summer briefly in a meeting,
and was moved by their stories,
and also by the way that the context
for this case felt so important,
it sort of had that, the academic side
to it that fit with what I was studying.
And so I ended up writing my senior essay,
as was mentioned, about this case.
Specifically about the racism in the media coverage,
the sort of animal language and imagery,
and the context for that.
And I couldn't let go of it after that.
I was thinking about law school,
I worked for the lawyers again on
other cases for a couple of years,
but this story stuck with me, and it felt
like such an important story that needed
to be told and it wasn't being told,
it was not something that, where the,
you know, the coverage of the convictions
being vacated had been minimal,
and it felt like nobody knew about this.
And so I decided to go back and write a book about it.
And I had never aspired to be an author,
It just felt like the right way to try to tell the story.
And so, figured out how to do that.
I didn't have any experience writing anything
that wasn't a college paper.
So I had to learn how to write in a totally different style,
how to interview people and be a journalist,
and sort of figured it out as I went along,
which was a painstaking process.
How to ask questions.
Talked to Yusef a number of times
over a number of years, until I started to figure it out.
And pretty early on in that process,
for me, you know, documentary film making
is the family business.
Both of my parents, my uncle, my husband,
are all documentary film makers.
And so it became very obvious that
we had to make this film and that
there was this potential to share the story
in a different way.
And while the book gives me this opportunity
to explore all the context and get into
a lot of detail about the case,
making a documentary gave us a chance
to interview Yusef and the other members
of The Central Park Five, some of their
family members, people who were there,
but most importantly them.
And that this was an opportunity,
a platform for them to tell their own story,
it doesn't have to be me telling it,
it can be them in their own words, talking about it.
And I think that that makes it
a much more powerful medium for sharing this story.
And so we started working on this film
and it came out, our first public premiere
was at the Cannes Film Festival in May of last year.
And since then we've been all over the country
talking in movie theaters and in schools
and high schools and middle schools and law schools
and just trying to spread the word about this story
and have conversations like this one.
So we're very glad that you're all here
tonight to talk about it.
- I want to keep this sort of conversation
as organic as possible, so I don't want to
be the one asking the questions, but
I wonder, Chris if you want to
share some of your insights or in terms
of thinking about your own work and what you do,
how you see this case just in light of
what we know is happening to other,
you know happening in communities of color
across the country and just, you know,
some of what your insights and perspectives
are around that.
- Yeah well, I'm happy to be here as well.
And I'm really honored to be on the panel
with y'all and meet you for the first time,
and having seen you on the film and all this stuff,
and having your dad visit our school
every year to help raise some money.
(laughter)
It's good to meet another part of the family.
(laughter)
But The Central Park Five is a very important film,
obviously because the recent verdict,
we just call it the verdict now around
the exoneration or the acquittal of George Zimmerman.
And perhaps that is part of the reason
at least that some of you all are here,
which is great, because time and time again
we feel that these cases are isolated events,
that they just popped up on our radar,
instead of being seen as a continuation
of the kind of logic that operates
throughout American society.
And you know, in terms of historical examples,
obviously we can talk about Emmett Till,
and we can talk about the Scottsboro boys case
in the 30s, but we don't even have to
go back that far actually, we can just really
look at 2012, and the fact that a group
that I'm affiliated with, The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement,
they composed a study called Operation Ghetto Storm.
And in that study, it's over 300 pages,
they document that in calendar year 2012,
there were over 300 extra-judicial killings
of black and brown youth by either police officers,
security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes
in the case of George Zimmerman.
So there's at least 312 other Trayvon Martins
that we don't even know, right?
And even after that study came out,
we just got reports about Darius Simmons
in Wisconsin, 13-year-old shot by a 76-year-old white man.
We have the other case of Jordan Davis,
also in Florida, who was the kid in the car
playing the music too loud and Michael Dunn
rolls up, probably drunk, just came from
his son's wedding, and empties eight or nine
bullets into the car, killing Jordan Davis.
So this is a very common, unfortunately,
violent experience that obviously results
in the kind of most fatal result, obviously, in death.
But really, they are expression of kind of
micro violences that go on in different ways,
whether you're talking about kind of
general surveillance that happens,
the general suspicion that's associated
with black mobility in this country,
and the way in which black folks are forced to compromise
in order to get along in this world.
And so I think that this is part and parcel
of the experience of being an African descendant
in this country that I think we shy away from
too often as a country.
So for me, when we think about Trayvon,
when we think about Central Park Five,
these things prove to me, they're evidence,
they're additional evidence of the fact
that we do not have a post-racial society.
In fact, I think that the Trayvon Martin killing,
the Zimmerman acquittal, are actually
obituaries to the idea of post-racialism in this country.
And I think that if we think about them
in those terms, then we can get realer
about how we bring about that healing
that I spoke about earlier that hopefully
we're all here to do.
But of course, in order to have
that kind of experience of renewed health,
we have to really deal with the pain,
and we have to deal with the wounds that are already there.
So I think that I try to encourage my students
to deal with the real around these questions,
and not be afraid of them, no matter where you're from.
And this is the way in which we achieve racial justice
is by confronting the idea head on rather than
trying to sweep it under the rug.
So there's plenty of historical examples
that we can point to, and we mentioned enslavement earlier.
I wonder if we had Twitter on the slave ships
what would we know?
So I'll just leave it there for now.
- Thanks, Chris.
So Yusef, you and I got to talk the other day a little bit.
I could hear the noisy city out there so I was appreciating
you were taking time from work to talk with me
and think about what we wanted
to have you bring to the panel.
And so I want to leave that open for you
to a certain extent in terms of where you,
how you think about these issues now in your life.
But you also talked a bit about
some of the work that you're doing
with juveniles and with children
and really thinking about how social institutions
overall are really impacting youth of color.
So I just wanted to invite you to speak
about that or whatever else you're moved
to speak about this evening.
- Well, I definitely thank you all for inviting me here,
and I'm glad to get here safely in one piece.
I'm glad, let me just first say that
I'm glad that Sarah had the...
I want to call it a calling.
I don't want to call it like, you know,
"I feel like I want to do something different,"
you know, I'm glad that Sarah had the calling
and responded to the calling to be
what I always call my liberator.
My comrade Korey Wise always gives
Sarah the nickname his angel.
Because, as he says it, he was in
a far worse prison than I was.
I mean I was in a bad prison,
and it wasn't until I got to the types of prisons
that Korey was in that I realized
how bad he had already, you know,
the situation that he was in was
already far worse than I could have ever imagined.
And when I hear him speak most of the times,
I hear the pain in his voice and he's still
dealing with the realities,
not just of being falsely imprisoned,
but the realities of what it means
to be let down by a judicial system
that's supposed to be there to protect you.
The realities that you realize that you're living inside of
what I now call the criminal system of injustice.
You're living inside of what we all now see
as this institutionalized racism.
One of the most important things that happened
with the Trayvon Martin verdict,
I mean it was a travesty of justice
that he was murdered, but the fact
that it was so much light and so much attention
brought to him and to the case,
was that it brought all of us together.
Those who wanted to deal with the issue
and solve the problem. You know.
And for some of us it was like a total let down
that George Zimmerman went free.
I forget what the first juror's name was,
Juror B something, something, what amazed me
was, I just want to speak on that for a second, like.
So what amazed me was, I play Words With Friends
all the time, right?
I'm on social media, I'm heavy on social media.
I'm on every, almost every social media outlet
that's out there, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+...
(laughter)
I'm just out there, Instagram, I'm everywhere, right?
- He has three phones in his pocket, too, yeah.
(laughter)
- And the great thing about it is that
it gives me the opportunity to
in a way, separate myself from reality
but also still play a part in it.
So I'm playing Words With Friends
and of course, what pops up on my screen
is on CNN, verdict is being announced.
So I'm like, "Verdict is being announced? It's Saturday.
I didn't know that they held court
on the weekend down in Florida."
(laughter)
I'm trying to get my last days
of deposition done on the weekend,
I'm still going through depositions.
I mean for those of you that saw
the whole film in its entirety,
the very last frame prior to the credits
being rolled is that we are still fighting this system,
and we've been fighting this system for justice
for over 10 years now.
They dropped the ball when they arrested us.
They dropped the ball further when
they convicted us, and then they sent us away.
And then they told Korey, like, Korey sometimes
doesn't tell the whole story, and I'm
bringing him up because he's not here, you know,
but he doesn't tell the whole story sometimes
but sometimes in our private conversations,
I get to
familiarize, refamiliarize myself with him.
He was my best friend when I was, before I went to prison.
And when I say refamiliarize myself with him,
I get a chance to hear about the experiences
that he had that were similar but different
than the experience that I had.
This one story that he told me,
and he's starting to tell us more,
but he told me about how when he
went to the parole board,
the people that were there to judge him on whether
he was going to get released on parole or not,
they said "Oh, you're Korey Wise, huh?"
He said "Yeah."
"You're the guy about that Central Park jogger case."
And you know, he was kind of like still not really sure
as to which, why were they even saying it like that?
And then he says to me that they said,
"You know to be honest with you,
we wish you had more time, because
every time you come before us, we would
hit you with 24 months until the rest of your life."
This is what they told him.
Now you look at that and then you look at
the truth that was exposed.
Because see you can have money
buy you a not guilty verdict,
but there's something completely different
when you look at not guilty and innocent.
You see?
And when they found out that we were
completely innocent, the DA's office
themselves said, "We gotta fix this."
And they wrote what amounted to be
a document, I forget exactly how thick it was,
but a pretty thick document about why
they needed to reverse the law,
the sentence, in regards to our case.
And it's so funny because in the film
it shows it perfectly because it's not made up.
This is one of the greatest things about documentaries.
It's reality right there in your face, right?
So in the film you see Michael Warren
there in front of the judge, talking to the judge,
saying to the judge what we want,
and then he's about to sit down,
and before he even sits, the judge says,
"Granted, have a Merry Christmas."
And it was almost like, wow, did he just say that?
And that's the part that's crazy because then you look at
cases like Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman,
and there were so many people that were like,
"Something just doesn't feel right with this case."
Many of us who have been through it already knew
that he was not gonna get found guilty.
It was a let down, but we already knew
that he wasn't gonna get found guilty.
And it just brought back to my reality
the fight that I'm in, and the fight that I continue
to be in, and how happy I am that this film came out.
Because the film introduces us to you all
and the rest of the world for the first time.
I mean Sarah said it best when she said,
people were always pointing the finger
saying, "This is who these guys are,"
or they were drawing pictures of us
and in these pictures, we looked like
monkeys and apes and all kinda other stuff.
They were talking about us and the language
that they were using was indicative
of the same not too distant past that we had just come from.
And this is how they were describing us.
I mean I have like so much to say,
I don't know if I should stop here, or,
you know because I'm thinking about that
and I'm thinking about how the system fails
not only the young, I mean I was 15 years old
when I got snatched up and placed into
the belly of the beast. 15.
I came home when I was a grown man.
So that whole time of learning how
to fill out a job application, going on
your first date, all kinda stuff,
that's the, I don't know anything about that.
It's funny, like a friend of mine
I was in prison with, he went on a date
with a young lady, and he's writing me
and I'm still in prison, he's home,
and he's writing me while I'm in prison,
and he's like, "Yeah I went on a date,
I brought some flowers to the girl
and she was like 'Wow that was so nice,
chivalry is not dead.'"
And it's funny because I guess
guys don't bring flowers anymore, right? (laughter)
But he says to me, he says, "I didn't know what to do.
I read that in a book." (laughter)
And that's the part that's amazing to me
because I used to always say that
we're living our lives trying to play catch up.
We're trying to catch up to what we missed.
And then I had to realize that we don't even
know what it was that we missed.
So in reality we are living our lives in spite of it all.
But this right here, I remember when
we first saw this film, you could
hear a pin drop, you know we were extremely quiet.
I think we all kind of had the same,
meaning The Central Park Five,
we all had the same feeling, and at the end,
Sarah and Ken and Dave were there,
and a few others, and they were saying,
"Well you know here, we're gonna fix the colors
and we're gonna put the credits here,"
and Korey said, "Hold up, hold up. This is a credit to us."
I mean, I've been not only all over North America
with regards to this film,
I was even called to go down to the Caribbean,
all expenses paid.
They said listen, we're gonna give you a vacation.
We just need you to come down and talk to us
about the Central Park Five.
And I had a great time. (laughter)
So, I mean I'll stop there for now.
- Aww, come on.
(applause)
- It's great, it's great.
- You know, just a quick-- (laughter)
- Please, I'm just here--
- Let me just say this, right.
Everywhere we go, right, and this is
how great this film is, you know.
Sarah's first film, but she has it in her blood.
And she's a book writer, right, so she has
a whole bunch of stuff in her blood, right.
We go into places and we get standing ovations.
I mean, what a way to be welcomed home.
I used to tell people that I was going out,
and I said you know what I have a collection now,
a collection now, of Citizen's watches.
I just started buying them.
I said, "You know what I'm a citizen again."
And I mean not, I know there's a legal definition
of what the word "citizen" means,
but not the legal definition, but just
what it means to me, being able
to be a part of the whole again,
let that circle be unbroken again, you know.
And to receive your applause, that is tremendous.
We went from the most hated to some of the most loved.
And that's tremendous. Thank you. (applause)
- Do either of you want to respond?
- I actually do have something to add to that idea.
No one who is responsible for this directly
would say, as Craig Steven Wilder sort of
puts it all in the film in some ways,
we're all responsible for this, right,
but, the police, the prosecutors, no one's
ever apologized to you, right?
There's never been any kind of official
or unofficial apology.
But the really amazing thing about
these sort of standing ovations
and being able to share the film with audiences
and have you guys come along, has been
that interaction with audiences.
And so the first time, so we had our screening
at this film festival first, and then
in the fall last year we went to
the Toronto Film Festival, and Raymond
was able to come along, and that was
the first time any of you guys
had been to a sort of big, like a public screening,
it's like 500 people and a film festival in Canada,
and so Raymond had seen the film before,
but he was sitting in the audience
in a room full of strangers for the first time seeing it,
and he, you know, they introduced us
afterwards and everyone claps, you know,
and then we introduced Raymond,
and they like stand up and cheer for him.
And he was, he's very good at talking about this,
he couldn't say anything for a few minutes,
and it was this really amazing experience,
and afterwards someone came up to us
on the street and said, "I was just in there,
and I have to say I think that that standing ovation
was our apology."
And that's been this amazing theme
throughout this experience of talking to people,
and we'll often get, I'm sure you've heard this one,
someone in an audience who will say,
"I don't have a question, I just want to say,
I lived in New York then, I remember this,
I believed you were guilty, I read the news
and I was convinced, and I just want
to say I'm really sorry."
And so it's not maybe the apology you deserve,
but there is something really amazing about that
experience of sharing this story
with people who respond in that way.
- Sarah, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more.
We talked about this at dinner, but
just the reactions, and maybe the both of you can,
but the reactions that you have gotten over time
from audiences around the film.
And I think it's interesting cause I think
what a lot of us hope for is that
as there's more visibility that there's
more increased conversation, more
increased awareness, and I'm not always
sure if that's the case, and maybe that's the cynic in me.
But I wonder if you can talk about that.
- You know, that's definitely a challenge,
I mean certainly, I think my goal initially
in trying to tell the story, write the book
and then make the film, was about
sharing this story with a wider audience.
It felt to me like a really important story
that wasn't known enough.
And so part of that is about, how do you
reach an audience and how do you
start a conversation and how does
that actually make a difference?
And that's a challenge, right?
I mean, we, being on PBS is a great way
to do that, you can reach millions
of people that way; we had a theatrical release,
but a documentary film, we made,
we were on a hundred or so screens
which was great, but still, we're talking about
tens of thousands of people and so
there was this question of how you reach people.
But the amazing thing that we found is that
people really do want to talk about it.
This isn't something where people go to the movies
and pay their 10 dollars and, or watch it on PBS
and then go home and stop thinking about it
and stop talking about it.
And that's been really amazing, to have these conversations.
I think when we started out to make the film,
there were a few goals, right.
One was just to set the record straight.
What really happened?
People don't know, we need to inform them
about the facts of this case.
Another is to think about how does this happen?
What are the mechanisms by which
a wrongful conviction happens?
Because of course that, hopefully, helps us
figure out how we can prevent it from happening again.
Because obviously this is not an isolated case.
We know this is happening all the time,
it's not limited to a time period.
I mean, learning about New York in 1989,
and the context is really important
to understanding this case, but it doesn't
mean that we're limiting this story
to a certain time and place, because
it's a much broader and more universal story than that.
And then it's also, as I said before,
about getting to know the Central Park Five
as human beings, who are they, how do they feel,
what has this experience been?
And I think one of the challenges that's come up
is what can we do about this?
And I was saying before, I am a story teller.
And so I, my job is to try to share the story with people
but then what next?
And so we can talk about the reforms
in the justice system that can hopefully
prevent things like this from happening, right,
we can video tape custodial interrogations
from the beginning rather than
at the end of 24, 36 hours when someone's
spirit is broken, let's turn that camera
on at the beginning. And that's happening.
The Innocence Project and others like that,
many others, I mean lots of organizations,
there's some information outside
about the Innocence Project, I think
you all saw when you came in.
That's one of the big things that they
advocate for that helps in, that helps
to prevent wrongful convictions,
and that's happening now in I think
19 states and the District of Columbia.
Which is great, but it should be everywhere.
And so we can work on things like that,
how do we better protect juveniles
in the system, have more support for them
if they are brought in and interrogated,
make sure that they know their rights.
How do we teach kids and families
and parents what your rights are?
But of course underlying all of this
is the bigger, harder problem, the one that's
even hard to talk about sometimes,
which is the racism underlying this,
the fact that we know that if the situation
had been reversed, and the accused were white
and the victim black, or any other sort of
combination of these things, we would be
looking at a different story.
And that's the thing that's really hard
to figure out what to do about.
And I think that's in some ways why we're all here.
And so I hope that, and maybe this is a cop out,
this isn't enough, but
as a story teller, as a cultural producer,
what I hope we can do in sharing
this story and sort of humanizing
these people who have been depicted
as animals in the first sort of public meeting of them,
in the press, that hopefully it helps not just
understand this case but, if someone
sees that and can relate to someone
who is different than them, that's
part of that, right, how do you move forward?
How do you move away?
And there are the sort of institutional ways
you can do that, but it's also just about
reaching people and having them
think differently, and maybe think
differently the next time.
And I don't have a good answer about that
but that's what we're trying to do in telling this story.
- I want to jump in here because
they hired me to be the angry one on the panel.
(laughter)
I gotta earn my stripes right about now.
- I didn't do that by the way.
- But one of the things in hearing
Yusef speak is just the remarkable
humanity that he possesses.
And I want people to pay attention to that
because everything about prison
is meant to break that down. It's to deny that.
And prison did not give him that,
that's in him, that's the creator,
that's his parents, that's him.
And so we really need to honor that.
And really honor the fact that
there are millions more Yusefs
languishing in America's prisons.
Some of them are born and bred
in the United States in the inner city,
some are recent immigrants who've been detained
for whatever reason.
And so I think that we need to honor
the humanity, I mention the humanity
because we're coming up on the 50th anniversary
of the march on Washington for jobs and freedom.
Now I wonder if the jobs and freedom portion
would be part of the 50th anniversary celebration.
It might just be 50th anniversary
of the I Have a Dream speech, or the 50th anniversary
of the march on Washington, but the actual
title is for jobs and freedom.
And if we look at our prison system,
and we see crimes, people being accused
of crimes or people committing crimes
and being convicted, what were they doing before that?
Were they gainfully employed, were they
in school, what were the conditions
prior to their incarceration?
These are the things that we really
have to think about if we're talking about
racial justice, but if we're talking about
abolishing the prisons or just prison reform.
It's just the idea that when you study
the prisons, to study the prisons
is to study race in America.
You can't study the prison without
engaging these questions of race and racial justice.
And we have some pamphlets out there
about the exonerations.
The national registry of exonerations
from 1989 to 2012 cited 873 exonerations
coast to coast. 873.
Now, over 50 percent of those were for murder cases.
Close to 40 percent of those were for rape cases.
The DNA testing helped to exonerate.
One of the beautiful things about Sarah's book
is that it walks you through the history
of the DNA testing, briefly and succinctly. (laughter)
Thankfully.
But the point is is that, that history is in there.
And the fact that when they were hung up
in the system in 89, April 89, DNA testing was still fresh.
People didn't really know what to do with it.
So there's a kind of medical history
and a racial history that intersect
in understanding how prisons proliferate,
and how court systems respond to
police coercion of testimony and whatnot.
I mean this case really forces us to do
some - what we used to call political education,
but really, we all need to be students of the law.
There's so many anecdotes in there
where even the professionals who were
paid and hired to really know the ins and outs
of the law failed to do their job.
Intentionally mishandled information,
withheld information, didn't compare cases, etc.
When the actual culprit, when they finally caught him,
I mean, I don't want to ruin the film if you
haven't seen it, but the point is,
we kind of know what happens, right?
Is that by the time he's caught,
people are looking like, and Sarah lays it out,
like, you almost want to call everybody
in the NYPD, I did, I was writing in the margin,
dumb, stupid, missed that, how you miss that, right?
There's a couple places in there where you
really lay out the fact that they missed some obvious stuff.
And so we really have to do some homework
consistently to really understand
how the legal structure is set up,
how it functions, and really so that
none of these, no more of our youth
in the inner city or elsewhere are trapped
in that same kind of predicament
where even the parents and guardians
felt that their hands were tied,
and that they couldn't even defend
their own loved ones' basic rights in this moment.
So I just want to salute you brother,
for the humanity that you continue to show.
- Thank you.
- And we should give him a round of applause.
(applause)
- I'm listening to what you're saying,
and something kept on popping into my head.
It was a conversation that Ken and I had.
And I was talking to Ken and I was saying,
"I'm the guy who believes in conspiracies,
you know it's a conspiracy that's going on,
they got a book about it, it's called
The Conspiracy to Destroy the Black Boys
Volume One and Two, and they even have
a book called The Conspiracy to Destroy the Black Girls."
And we were vibing back and forth
and Ken said, "There is no conspiracy."
And I said, I kinda was thrown for a second,
I said, "What is he talking about?"
And Ken shattered my whole thinking
by saying just this, he said, "Most of the time,
we can't wrap our minds around
the devious, negative nature that breeds
what we think is a conspiracy.
This is just part of the plan."
And that's the part when I look at
what happened to me, because I have
an out-of-body experience, I think this is
one of the reasons why I can move forward
a lot easier, I have an out-of-body experience
where I'm not really dealing with the case,
what happened to me, from inside.
I'm looking at it kind of like the way
Korey talks about he's helping that young boy.
Korey changed his name, he's not even
Korey Wise anymore, he's Korey King Wise, legally.
The spelling of his name is not even the same.
That's how profound this is.
But understanding it from that perspective,
like, this is why it's the institution
that's racist, this is why I couldn't understand,
like, "Hold on, you mean to tell me that
in the constitution, it says that we have a right
to bear arms?"
But in New York City, stop and frisk is happening
overwhelmingly to black and brown people.
We overwhelmingly don't have guns. We don't carry anything.
And then Mayor Bloomberg comes out
recently and says, "We need to stop and
frisk them more, I don't think we're doing enough."
And this lends to what you said before
about maybe Sarah said it, had the tables
been turned, would Trayvon Martin
have been able to get let free if the law
was, he was standing his ground? You know?
And that's the part that's so crazy
because then you look at the whole legal system,
I think about like my court attorney,
my trial attorney was a divorce lawyer.
And that was my attorney because
he was a friend of my mom's, we didn't have any money.
So we'd look, we'd look and look and look
and try to find somebody that could help us,
my mom's friend, who was a divorce attorney,
became my attorney in a criminal trial.
I don't even have to say anymore about that. But then--
- And it's worse than you can even imagine.
- Exactly. I mean, then I think about my appeal attorney.
My appeal attorney was Bill Kunstler.
And I was in the film with the Kunstler daughters
and there's this part in the film
where he's talking about the legal system and how
we understand the legal system, like on a whole.
Unless you've been through it, unless
you know somebody who's been through it,
unless you're fighting this, you're looking at this
and you're saying well, they, like almost
like when the verdicts came back
with George Zimmerman, you know it's like,
he went through the legal process and this was the law.
So it wasn't until like yesterday
or the day before yesterday that
a different juror came back and said,
"I wanted to convict him, but legally I couldn't."
That was like wait, hold up, there's one constitution.
But justice is --
just us being exempt
if you happen to have a darker shade of skin color.
And the part that's so amazing is, I think
white people who have lived in Harlem,
you know me and my lady, we joke all the time,
because we may see like some Amish folks
coming down the block, they look Amish,
I mean, you know. (laughter)
But I think they actually are.
When we see some Amish folks coming down the block,
and we live, I have to explain it like this,
we live down the block from Strivers Row.
We don't live on Strivers Row, so we live down the block
where people still shoot, people still do all kind of
crazy stuff in the tenement buildings.
And we jokingly say, you know cause you look in Harlem
today, you look at all of these places that have
become gentrified, people are coming into these spaces
that black and brown people have been
all of their lives, and sometimes they say,
how could they live, how have they
been able to live like this?
But we've been doing it all of our lives.
And with regards to this, I'm gonna call them Amish family,
we'll jokingly say, they've been here
for 25 years, they've been owning that brownstone
that my mother used to always say, if she had
the money then, she could have bought
a brownstone on Strivers Row for 50,000 dollars.
The houses now cost 1.2 million dollars.
But what people are finding out
as we begin to really become a melting pot in Harlem
is that all of the stories that they were being told,
even like, say for instance,
if you guys didn't see the movie
and I just came here today and I started
talking to you about the Central Park jogger case,
and how there was these young boys that got arrested
for a crime they didn't commit,
they went to prison for it and all that sort of stuff,
most people would be like, "That sounds
like a really fascinating fantasy story
that he just made up."
But this story was building on the same premise
that a black man should not be allowed
to be with a white woman.
And the great thing about Ken Burns' films
is that he deals with that whole racial tension
and aspect of things in all of his films. I mean it's great.
I just became introduced to it,
first with the Central Park Five, but I got the collection.
(laughter) But you look at that, and you start
saying to yourself, these things
that they were told, these lies that
they were being told, a lot of people
are realizing that they were really lies.
Black people aren't, you don't have to
walk in crowds in Harlem.
You don't have to be out of Harlem when the sun goes down.
As a matter of fact, a black person,
you may knock on a black person's door
and in reality, but maybe jokingly say,
"Hi I'm your neighbor, can I just have a cup of sugar?"
and they say, "Oh sure, no problem."
And get you a full cup of sugar. And you can keep the cup.
I mean, because the nature of us
and this is partially unfortunate, but this is the reality.
The unfortunate side is that, I think
Angela Davis said it, she said, "Black people
are the only group of people that have historical amnesia."
We quickly forget, but that's the reality.
That's how forgiving we are.
Because today, if I talk to my stepson
or if I talk to young boys, or if I talk
to young girls about the realities of slavery
and how the new slavery is the prison system,
they'll be looking at me like I had five heads.
Because young people today, I'm not sure
about up here, but definitely in Harlem
and Brooklyn and Queens and everywhere
in the inner city, they want to go to prison,
they feel like prison is a badge of honor.
"I'm gonna be there, we gonna be running the show."
But then when they get there, they meet
the officers that I met that had tattoos
of black and brown babies on their arms.
They would tell you very easily,
"We will kill you and put you under the prison.
Your family will never find you."
It's called getting lost in the system.
That's a lot of words to leave on.
- Thanks, Yusef.
So, I know that in a moment we do want to
move to some questions for folks
so you can be thinking about those.
I think one piece that I just wanted to
bring to the conversation, and we don't
necessarily need to expand on it too much,
and Yusef, I thought of it when I went back
and looked at several of the clips
where you're interviewed, I can't remember
which one it was now.
But I was appreciating one particular moment
where you talked about that it was
important to remember that there were six victims.
- [Yusef] Yes.
- And so I just want to bring that into the room.
Because I think again, I'm not fully aware,
and maybe you and Sarah want to
talk about this a little bit or not,
but in terms of how she has been involved
with these conversations with you
in different ways, on panels, I'm not
really sure of that, I have a little bit
of information about that.
But I do know that in our class this summer,
we talked a little bit about how we need to
remember her, and I was appreciating
that you brought that to one of the clips
that I saw, so I'm not sure if either of you
want to speak to that.
- You know, Trisha Meili, the victim of the rape,
of course had no memory of the attack,
and so while she testified in the trial
about sort of her whereabouts and
to garner sympathy with the jury I'm sure,
she didn't really add anything to the case. She couldn't.
And since then, she wrote, as it's mentioned
at the end of the film, she wrote a book
that came out right after the convictions
were vacated about her recovery.
And she's really focused very much on telling,
and she's actually now,
her sort of primary work is as a public speaker.
She goes around and gives a lot of talks,
I think, about her recovery.
And that's really what she focuses on,
how she's a survivor of a traumatic brain injury
and how she made this really miraculous recovery
from what could have easily killed her.
And that's what she's focused on.
And she's really, for the most part,
not waded into the conversation
about the wrongful convictions at all.
She, in the beginning of her book,
it's clear that the book was sort of
written before this all happened,
and so at the beginning in her prologue
or introduction or something, there's a mention
of the fact that there is this new information
and this guy has come forward,
but she's not really going to address it
because that's not what her book is about.
And I think that's basically the position she's taken.
I mean, we approached her, I did for the book
and then for the film and invited her
to participate.
She declined and I think
I understand that, I can appreciate that.
But she hasn't been sort of out, and I mean
you've never met her at any point, right?
I mean she's I think really removed herself
from that part of the story.
And so there really hasn't been any overlap
I mean Raymond always says when he's asked
about it, you know, our door is open.
It's like, if that's something that
she could bring herself to do, to come
and talk about it, great, but also,
with an understanding that that's not necessary.
- I mean when I think about it,
I think about it, actually when you started speaking
about the six victims I thought about something
that other folks had been saying in certain
events that we'll be at where they're
always talking about not only the Central Park Five,
but the Central Park Six or the Central Park Seven.
And why would it be called the Central Park Five,
why would the film be called The Central Park Five?
As opposed to the other guys, right?
And one of the things that we've always addressed
was the fact that those guys never became known
in the case the way that we had become known.
I mean, Alton Maddox's client was almost like freed.
Right after he fought for him initially, he was let go.
But this whole idea and understanding
about this legal system, about how
the legal system failed the primary victim.
Here you have a woman who was raped,
and when she comes through, miraculously,
as the papers reported back then,
the people who met her were the DAs,
the police officers, "This is who did this to you;
we got them we put them in prison;
this is how it went down."
She comes to court, she takes the stand,
she offers her presence that makes the jury
believe that they need to convict us.
And you find out 13 years later,
you know 13 is supposed to be this unlucky number.
Buildings don't have a 13th floor,
Friday the 13th, oh, don't go outside
to the party tonight, you know, it's Friday the 13th.
It's like for us, it became a liberator as well.
But the liberation was quickly smacked down
because it was a blip on the large media mass
or of the media mass that had initially come out.
Like when we first got arrested,
there were over 400 articles written about this case.
I mean articles that were like common citizens
pulling out their money, paying for ad space,
calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty
specifically for our case.
The trial hadn't even started yet,
and here's Donald Trump, "I wanna hate these people."
I mean you look at the piece that was written
and had this been the 50s, we would have
been drug out of our homes, hung from trees
in Central Park, we would have been
definitely castrated, possibly burned.
And that would have been that. No trial.
And it would have been 13 years later
that the truth comes out, but it's like a whisper,
and we sweep it under the rug,
"Hopefully nobody saw that, we had to report it,
but hopefully nobody saw that we had to exonerate them."
Because in, close to New York, I was invited
to Garfield, New Jersey.
I was invited there because a young man
had been murdered by the cops.
I don't know if you guys saw this piece on the news.
There was a guy sitting in a police precinct.
And then all of a sudden you just see him
run out of the precinct.
And then they said they found him
some time later in an abandoned building
with a gunshot to his head that he shot himself in the head.
He was handcuffed, somehow he shot
himself in the head after he ran out.
Couldn't take the freedom, you know.
And I was called there because
the people of Garfield thought
that the Central Park Five were still in prison.
This was like last year.
They thought we were still in prison.
That's how much information was out there.
But in terms of like what we could do,
that's the part that's great about today.
The social media aspect, the films that we watch, the
discussions that we have, the more critical that we can be.
Even realizing like you know what,
I'm all for understanding that there needs
to be mass reform, but I also know
that that will cause a mass war,
and that's a war that people aren't really
able to truly digest.
It's almost like if I say to you guys,
like they said to us, they said you know,
"We're gonna have a blackout day.
We're gonna black out America for Trayvon Martin.
We're not gonna buy anything on the 23rd of July."
This is what they said, nobody buy anything.
When you take money out of the powers that be pockets,
you have called for war.
And that's the part that's hard to digest,
because we won't understand what it truly means
to be in that kind of struggle.
But that's the type of struggle that we need to be in.
We need to be in a struggle.
My mother always says it, she says, "It'll take one person
to," you know like, if we're boycotting in 125th street,
because it's Malcolm X's birthday or something
like that, it takes one person to stop that boycott
just by walking into the store."
We need to be of one mind when it happens like that.
But a lot of times it's like, it's an us or them kind of
understanding, and that's the part that's unfortunate.
- We are gonna give some time to questions.
We have two volunteers that will be
moving up and down the two aisles.
So if you would like to ask a question,
and what we also wanted to encourage
folks to do is, in terms of trying to create
some sort of a dialogue with the panelists,
is that maybe when you stand to
ask your question, make a comment,
that you also talk about something that you've heard
so far tonight that you just want to
share back to the panelists that resonated for you
or that you're thinking about.
So we want to encourage you to do that.
And don't be shy.
- [Voiceover] All right, should I stand?
- You don't have to. It's up to you.
- [Voiceover] Oh okay, okay, I'll stand.
Before I raise my question which deals
with social media and larger conversations
around cinema, my friend sent me
this photo with a comment from
Dick Gregory, and I just wanted to quote it
really fast, it's not long at all.
And just imagine Dick Gregory's voice,
who is quite hilarious but just, his truth is so piercing.
He says, "But let me tell you something
that's interesting; out of the thousands
of black cops in America, you never
turn on the TV or pick up the newspaper
and see where a white family is complaining
that some black cop shot their child
or mother or father in the head 40 times.
Now ask yourself the question, are black cops
more spiritual than white cops?
Are black cops better trained?
No, black cops know that white folks
ain't gonna tolerate it, that's why you don't see that."
All right, so that really stuck out to me.
And I think he's really kind of calling for
an activism that would come in many forms
but a particular form in which people
begin to question the police very critically.
And that leads me to my question
regarding social media that you mentioned,
Brother Yusef, and I just found it
very interesting that this film
is coming out around the same time
as Fruitvale Station just came out.
I hope if you haven't seen that film, please check it out.
It is one of the most powerful films
I have ever seen in my entire life.
Also, in October of this year, there's
12 Years a Slave that's coming out,
and also, this is in the context
of slavery by another name and a number
of films that deal with black subjectivity,
just the incarceration of black people.
I wanted to talk to you about, Yusef and Sarah,
about where you find this film in that
larger conversation of a kind of counter narrative
to police violence and to a larger narrative
of black people being subjected
to different kinds of oppressions.
- Well, you know, all I can say about that
is I absolutely do see it as part of that narrative
and I hope that it can play a role
in changing some minds and raising
some of those questions.
And I think that it's especially
important today for documentary films
to be able to do that as a medium,
especially as we see the sort of decline
of print journalism that I think documentaries
can play a really important role
in not only covering these stories,
but hopefully covering them in a really
thoughtful way and a way that has
enough distance to do some of that analysis
and to raise some of those bigger questions
rather than just sort of doing the news.
And that's one, this is maybe slightly off topic,
but just in thinking about documentaries and
that sort of responsibility as journalists.
We were subpoenaed by the city
for our out takes from the film.
And they argued that we were not journalists,
basically, that we weren't protected
by the shield laws for journalists
because we were advocates.
Which is, of course, not how the law works anyway,
but besides the point, and so we fought that
because not only really on principle, the sort of larger
sense that documentarians do need to be
identified as journalists and protected as such
because it's such an important medium today
for being able to share those stories
and to sort of be a part of that conversation
and to hopefully push that conversation
in different directions, and so we filed a motion
to quash the subpoena which the magistrate judge
in the case granted, but the city has appealed it
to the district judge.
So we're still actually waiting to find out about that.
We feel very confident about it, but
this is one of the complicating factors
when it comes to trying to tell these stories, even.
Which is, even if we have the law on our side,
we don't have a legal team, so that's been
a challenge for us.
But I do think that this medium is really important
for telling that story, and feature film
can be, too, I haven't had a chance
to see Fruitvale Station yet, but I've been
reading about it for the past year
and really looking forward to it.
But sometimes you can reach a different audience
that way, even if it's a fictionalized version of
a story, though it sounds like that one
is trying to be very accurate.
And I think there's a place in the conversation
for all of those different forms,
and they're all really important.
We were just at a, we just got an award
for this film from the American Bar Association
for something that was about, it's called
the Silver Gavel Award and it's about,
I forget the whole length of the thing,
but it's basically works that promote
a better understanding of the law.
And it was really amazing to see
some of the other honorees because
you do see, there were a couple of these
investigative journalists there
who had exposed these really interesting stories
that often had to do with racism, not surprisingly,
and our prison system.
And they talked about the fact that they are a dying breed.
And so, trying to figure out even how you
can tell these stories and get them out there
and reach an audience is a really interesting challenge
today I think.
- I mean I think about it from
the perspective of it being, when a group
wants to put a list of films together
that are must see films, like I'm a little scared
to see Fruitvale Station, and I just have to
be honest with that, because I've been
on panels with folks who have been,
who are friends with Oscar.
I've been on panels with this one guy
who basically became the stepfather
of sorts to his daughter.
And it's painful when you know people
from that close of a proximity
and you know a lot about the story
because it's like, when you see these things,
when you see stuff like what happened
to Sean Bell and you see what's happened
to Amadou Diallo, and countless others.
It's like these stories have to be told,
and they have to be understood that
it's not isolated incidents.
The Central Park jogger case wasn't a case
that happened to five unfortunates.
This is a case that happens all the time,
it's happening right now.
And to be able to shine light on that,
to be able to look at it from that perspective
and realize, this is a necessity.
Because it also talks about statistics
and how it relates to the black community
and the brown community.
How the statistics that are against us
state that we are gonna be dead or in jail
before we reach the age of 21.
But none of us made that choice,
but that's the choice that's put on us.
And so even if we're trying to escape,
you still have babies holding up signs
that say, "Don't shoot, I want to grow up."
And then when you look at us, like
the Central Park Five, I think the part
that I think people are more impressed by
is the fact that we survived it.
Like how did we go through that?
How did we walk through hell and survive?
And that's like, in a way we were the ones that escaped.
But we really didn't, but in a way we did.
- [Voiceover] I just want to say peace
to my brother here, Yusef Salaam.
I just wanted to say that, I'm 40 years old,
I'm from New York.
And I think that I have post-partum
things like going through my body, so, emotional.
But I think that what's important
about your story, and I think that
it gets lost sometimes is that
well for one, there was kind of a movement,
there was a movement that moment
to kind of meet some of the craziness.
People were, I guess there were people thinking
you were guilty, but there was also
a lot of people, folks who knew you were innocent.
- Yeah.
- [Voiceover] It wouldn't make sense
to a black person in New York that
a bunch of teenagers would attack
a white woman in Central Park,
it just wouldn't make sense to us.
And also, you're involved in--
I'm serious, it just wouldn't make sense.
And then you're involved in a patchwork of things.
Yusef Hawkins, I mean these are the things
that we lived through.
I'm in like New York when kids still
changed the lyrics of the songs
and say Kiss FM, whatever.
But I just think that that history
needs to be recuperated about what's happening
there with all these different events on our bumpers.
William Shatner did an interview with Bernhard Goetz,
and the interview is so chilling to me,
a teenager in New York that moment,
hearing the way he's talking about
these youth that he shot and I think
that attitude was so prevalent,
and we also, there's also flip sides,
like I'm responding to the specific guys
who are talking about if he was white.
We don't have to speculate that,
there were lots of cases in New York.
There was a white guy who killed the woman
in the park, there was something in Connecticut,
I can't remember his name, Michael something,
he killed, around exactly the same time
that y'all were there, you know what I'm talking about.
And I just think that that needs to be
kind of discussed, that there's a whole movement
there in that moment around polarization
in New York, the way the subways were
and also there's black folks and brown folks
who are also involved in this kind of movement
and I think you guys are at the beginning of it,
unfortunately, to kind of think about
what did that mean for us?
How are we gonna change those things?
So I think those are all important pieces.
I mean, I think that that case makes more sense
in the context of all these racialized events
that are happening and people are just like
getting their heads blown off in that moment.
So anyway, I just think that's something else
that, and I guess we'll get there because
20 years later we recuperate the history.
- I mean, I think that we just really,
we don't, somebody said when the verdicts came out,
somebody responded and said, "We don't need another march."
And I thought about that, and I remember when
Amadou Diallo got shot, and I heard about it,
I was coming home from work, and I was on the bus.
I was working at this place called
Internet Customer Service Enterprise.
And I was on the bus coming across 42nd street,
and traffic was like at a stand-still.
I said man, later for this, I'm getting off,
I'm walking to the train station.
And I got off, walked, and I'm hearing
the people chanting, and I didn't know what was going on.
I didn't know that they were marching, right.
When I found out what was happening, I joined that march,
and I walked from 42nd street to the World Trade Center,
and I didn't feel it at all.
That's how electrically charged it was.
But the problem is, with the way that we respond...
I don't want to say it has no effect,
but collectively, there has to be a different response.
Because we can't just say okay, we're gonna sing
a song, We Shall Overcome, and they're gonna
stop doing what they're doing.
There has to be a different type of dynamic going on.
We can't fall asleep, we can't say, okay march,
let me go back home and go back to my reality.
This is the reality. This is the whole.
And unfortunately, social media almost,
in a way it did us an injustice.
Because for those of us who prefer
to be bystanders and look at it,
we can look at what's happening in Egypt,
and see what's happening in Tahrir Square
and say wow, okay cool, man, alright,
let me go to sleep, or let me go to work,
or let me go do whatever.
But these folks are out there mobilized
because of social media.
And that's the part that needs to change as well.
How do we attack,
and not attack from the perspective of -
well, it is war. It is war.
But I was, see I was taught martial arts.
And in martial arts, the first thing
that we were taught was how to repel, how to heal.
It's not gonna do anything, you know I forget
who said it, somebody said that we can't,
the answer to violence isn't to take out
our guns and to start shooting folks.
Because we're not gonna, nobody's gonna hear us.
And not only that, we don't have enough guns
to go to war with America.
Because as soon as we start, I mean we already know.
We've seen it, we've seen it in Philly,
you see what I'm saying?
We've seen it all over the place.
But it's like how do we fight
and part of that is healing, part of that is repelling,
part of that is understanding from a whole.
Like my daughters shouldn't feel weird
when we're walking down the block
and they raise their hand and say, "Hi, Mr. Officer."
And I hit their hand and I say, "They're not your friends."
With a straight face, I can't smile when I'm doing that.
But I mean, they shouldn't feel weird about that.
Because that type of education,
that's the conversations that we're having
at home, that's the conversations we're having
around the dinner table.
How do you survive tomorrow?
You're still with us today.
How do you survive tomorrow?
And that's the part that's like...
Nah.
(unclear speaker from audience)
- [Voiceover] Okay wow, I feel a lot of pressure all
of a sudden; thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
I just have to say that being here and witnessing
and listening to you is a way that I am
maintaining my own community, and I just
cannot appreciate and express in words
how much, how important that is for me.
And also to thank the Smith community, of course.
In particular, Chris and Yusef, you've mentioned
the importance of maintaining one's humanity.
And Yusef, you mentioned your own particular way
and means of being able to do that.
And just thinking of parents with young black children
who are forced to teach their children that
they cannot react in the face of injustice
because they're black.
How do you teach them on a daily basis
to maintain their own humanity,
and when they're obtaining an education,
living their lives, where institutional racism
profoundly exists and is promoted,
knowing that they hold close and dear
that reality of the modern-day slavery
that you speak to, which is the prison system,
and I would add also, the business of sexual exploitation
for brown and black children.
And so I want to know for all of you,
but in particular, Yusef I know that you
have family and children of your own I believe.
What do you actively teach them on a daily basis?
- I was at a panel once listening to
Dr. Adelaide Sanford, and she was talking about
how to be, and she was saying that
a lot of young people in this new hip-hop culture,
they want to be hip and they want to be down
and they have this lingo and way of talking.
And she said well we need to be trilingual.
We need to be able to understand and know
how to talk when we're being around friends,
we need to understand how we need to talk
and deal and operate when we're around
what can be conceived as the enemy.
But we need to be able to know that we have a future.
Some of my conversations with my children
center around understanding that you have to plant seeds.
Those seeds are similar to what the folks
who plant olive seeds.
I mean I don't think that the person
who's planting an olive seed for the first time
is ever gonna see the fruits of the labor.
They're never gonna ever be able to
pluck an olive or get some oil from that tree.
But their children may. And their children's children may.
But it's that far type of thinking
that causes the person to plant the seed
in the first place.
And for me, I have a weird type of reality
that I'm faced with, because my personal children
are daughters, like I have five daughters.
I have two stepsons and a stepdaughter as well,
but, with your personal children,
it's like you have to, it's hard to talk to them
sometimes, because I remember one time
my daughter, my oldest daughter's 12 now,
and I think she might have been five or four
or something like that.
And like I said I live down the block from Strivers Row,
we happen to live in the penthouse
on the sixth floor, but we just don't have an elevator.
So we have to walk up the stairs all the time.
So as we were walking up the stairs,
and my daughter, there was three of them,
so I couldn't carry everybody, I had to
carry the baby, right?
So it's like, "Daddy, this is hard, it's hard, my legs."
And so I kinda, I didn't,
hopefully I didn't scare her.
But I said "Get yourself together, woman!"
(laughter)
I said, "We gotta get up there, but you gotta help me."
And it's funny because you look at my daughter today,
I don't think she ever, well maybe she might remember that,
that might be one of those memories
that you never forget. (laughter)
But it's like, having them realize
and understand the reality that we're faced with,
this is a struggle that has been going on
since the story was told in the bible about Ham.
And for the people who were to be the outcasts,
to be the black and the brown, and for
the language to be changed,
so that people can be looking at the majority of people
and calling them the minority, there's a problem.
But pointing those things out, and also
letting them know, you can't get up
in the face of the enemy and challenge.
Because even if you tell your children
the truth about slavery, the truth about history,
and they go to class and they write a paper
about the truth about history, they will get an F.
Because that's not what the books say.
So at one point in time, the Central Park Five
was in history books, and the history books
would talk about this big crime
that Mayor Koch talked about.
The crime of the century, and how we got them.
Then they had to change the books
because that history wasn't true.
But it's like, it's hard because our challenge
I think is to not give up, and find creative ways
to be able to make sure we push our way into the future.
Somebody had, you told me that it was Roosevelt
or somebody who said it.
I was at a demonstration and I said
somebody had posted on Facebook
a photo and the photo said when you're
walking through hell, keep on going, or keep on walking.
And that's been my model, that's been
my reality, that's been how you get it done.
I think part of the problem is that
there's a certain hopelessness in it,
but not really.
Because see when I go to work, let me
just tell this story real quick.
Like when I first came home, it was
very difficult for me to get a job.
I would go to try to get jobs and
then I finally joined an organization
called Fight Back, Harlem Fight Back,
and they were placing people
in the jobs; they were forcing the people
who were employing folks in our communities
to take us, right.
And so I got this job; I was a construction worker.
But they didn't let me learn anything,
they put me in the what do they call those things,
when they bring the thing off the truck
and they put all the dirt and all that stuff in there,
it's the dump truck but it's that part that,
in New York, they leave them on the streets.
They put me in one of those.
And they told me to take all the glass
out of the windows because the owner
wanted to be able to resell all of the aluminum
that he was getting, so he was only getting
money from the building, but he wanted
to take this found money that he wasn't
sharing with us, and resell it so that he could
put some more money in his pocket.
And they found out who I was.
And I remember there was a dialogue
that played itself out in the media,
and the reason that I say it like that is because
ultimately, I got fired, I got a pink slip
that came in the daily news.
So the pink slip, the article says:
Yusef Salaam gets the axe.
And it was almost like this sentiment
that wherever I went, the citizens
of New York were gonna exact justice on me
to make sure that I was having a hell of a time.
So, I was going places and the doors of success
were being shut in my face.
And then finally, I started listening to
motivational speakers.
Uncommon motivational speakers.
One guy I came across, he has this piece
called How to Position Yourself for Success.
Because it's not enough to be in the right place
at the right time, you have to be doing the right thing.
You have to be ready, right.
And here I was in my mom's office,
and I'm reading books and I'm very interested
in computers and things like that.
And I was self-educating at that point.
And a woman comes in who's a lawyer,
and walks by my office space, looks
at the books and says, "Who's reading these books?"
My mom said "Oh that's my son. He needs a job."
I was working for my mom but she was always plugging.
(laughter) So she said "Oh, I know the perfect job for him."
Sent me on an interview.
And you would think that because
I was in prison, I'm a master of time.
Today I got here on time.
In the nick of time, right.
I got to this job interview an hour late.
I had worse than CP, CP time, is that CP time? (laughter)
Worse, I had worse than that, right.
We hate time.
Having been a former inmate, we hate time.
Because time is then telling you what to do,
where to be and where to go.
So here I was bucking the system,
saying ah, I'll get there when I get there.
Got there, and got the job.
I was working as a consultant at
New York Presbyterian Hospital,
the number one hospital in New York City.
I worked there for seven years.
The only reason why I left New York Presbyterian
was because another hospital from New York
calls me up and says, "Hey, we hear that you're
the administrator there."
Because at that point I had moved up,
I started listening more to the success stuff,
I was being more on time, you know, (laughter)
and prepared, got me a iPad, I was like you know what.
Two phones and a watch, right. (laughter)
I get this call, and at that point
I'm now meeting with the CEOs and the
CIOs and the CTOs of the organizations,
and I'm like, "Wow, this hospital wants to hire me."
So I said, "Well I'm comfortable here, I mean
you guys called me."
They said, "Well how much, what's your price, salary wise?"
So I said, "Man, I've never been asked that before."
Because at that point I was making decent money.
You're never really making decent money
when you got five children, though. (laughter)
I was making, I was okay, I was okay.
So I threw what to me was a fictitious number
out there, you know it's gonna cost
this amount for me to go.
Well the guy says...
"Well, we could do that, but 50 dollars less."
I said, "50 dollars less? That's all?
That's the negotiation?" (laughter)
I handed in my letter of resignation.
I had to go.
And it was a fortunate, I mean the doors
of success have just been opening up
more and more, and one of the great things
I think that I'm finding out is that
what I'm doing, I'm not supposed to be doing.
Like I work in health care, and I'm good at what I do,
but I'm not supposed to be doing that.
I'm supposed to be in the streets,
I'm supposed to be in the struggle.
I'm not supposed to be in the back office somewhere
making a whole bunch of money, keeping my mouth shut.
This is why I love coming to these types of forums.
Because not only does it give me an opportunity
to reintroduce myself to you all,
but it also gives me an opportunity
to go through somewhat of a therapy session.
Like they didn't ever say to us, "You guys were damaged.
We're gonna help you re-enter society."
We did that stumbling and falling, you know.
And now, I walk into a place, and unless
you know me, you would think -
people never expect that I've ever been in prison,
that I've ever been in prison for almost 7 years.
They never expect that.
And then when they find out, it's like,
my ex-boss found out.
And he came to his boss, he said, "Do you know who he is?"
He said "Yeah, he's our telecom guy." (laughter)
He said, "But do you know who Yusef Salaam is?"
And he knew who I was, but he said,
"Well has he done anything wrong?"
He said "No."
So my boss said to his boss, "Well what do we do?"
So his boss said, "We do nothing."
This is a guy, the boss' boss was giving me
his computers and saying, "Ah, the screen is broken.
Can you fix it?"
And so I was fixing computers on my spare time
as I was still working and doing other things.
I mean this was like the type of experiences
that I was having.
But man I think we're like, over our time.
- I know that it's a little after nine,
so what we want to do is just give time
for a few more questions; if folks need
to depart, we understand that, but
I feel like there's just, there is time
and I think our panelists can hang in there
for a few more minutes.
- I see some hands. - One in the back.
- Yeah.
- [Voiceover] Should I go?
- Yes. - Yes.
- Yes, please, please do.
- [Voiceover] Hi, my name is Henry White
and I'm a resident here in Northhampton
and first of all, this is a great event here,
just want to share my appreciation.
And to Brother Yusef, first of all, I want to
just share Chris' sentiments to you,
and I'm inspired just by your sense of humility
and that innate humanity that you're expressing here.
It's wonderful, and it's refreshing, I appreciate that.
One of the things that stuck out to me
during the clip, which was very powerful,
and I think Sarah talked a little bit
about it a little while ago with the journalist,
I think he was a reporter.
And he started, he was apologizing,
like I think his exact words was, you know,
"A lot of people did not do their jobs."
And to me, that was so telling,
because when we talk about systematic injustice,
systematic racism, systematic,
or institutional injustices, the culpability runs deep.
And it runs far wide.
And his comments to me was just an affirmation of that.
And it happens, I mean it happened back then;
it happens all the time now.
People are just not doing due diligence
and getting the real stories, talking real
as Chris was talking about earlier.
The other thing real quick I want to just comment on
was something Chris said about just
having a real conversation, especially
when it comes to prison reform
and the criminal justice system and so on.
You can have that conversation, and definitely
about the racial injustices, but I don't think
that you can have that conversation
without having the conversation about
the history of labor in America and the work force.
Because in my opinion, that's where
the incentives come in when you talk about
private or privatized prisons, the profits,
and the incentives to keep that revolving door
of black and brown folks going into that system.
Because they drive that labor force in there,
and that's the history.
So I commend you all.
And I mean there's so much that I could react to
and respond to, but the conversation continues.
And again, Brother Yusef, just continue on, man.
You're an inspiration, and Sarah, thanks for doing this.
It's been great.
So I just want to commend you guys, great job.
- You know, I just saw something today that the judge
in Pennsylvania, I think, was sentenced to prison time.
This judge who had been convicted of basically
funneling kids into the prison system for profit.
And so we're not even just talking about
the prisons themselves and the people
profiting from those but, when that even
leaks into the judicial system too.
And I think that there are a lot of,
when you mentioned earlier about police
and sort of trusting police to do their jobs right,
again, so many layers of people not doing their jobs.
And I think even beyond that, there's this
sense that as someone says at the end of the film,
that we're all, I think we're all sort of responsible.
There's a sense that the media is telling this story
that's false, but we're also buying that story.
We're buying those newspapers.
And so I think in some ways I like to say
that we get the press we deserve.
So it's easy to pass that blame around,
but I think it is even broader than that.
But one thing I learned in doing my research
about this story was about the police,
and how this stuff comes up, and
it's not just in the interrogation room
where they cross the line, sort of knowing
that they will get the benefit of the doubt
in terms of interrogations, but there was a study done
in the early 90s about police corruption in New York City.
And they found not only these limited examples of
sort of extreme corruption, like taking money
from drug dealers for protection and stealing
evidence and drugs and money and stuff like that,
but they found widespread corruption
in the sense of perjury, which was so prevalent
that the police had a nickname for it, "testi-lying."
Which was basically understood among
these police officers, detectives, usually
who would come and testify in cases,
that essentially the ends justified the means.
Well, we know he's guilty, so to get up on the stand
and say something that isn't true
to make sure that person goes to prison is fine
It's useful, that this was the sense.
And you see that in this case.
You see, before the trials, there was a hearing
to determine the admissibility of the statements.
And the detectives in the case
all got on the stand and told the judge,
"All I asked him was what happened and what happened next."
Now, that is remarkable.
Because, if that's what they were doing,
they weren't doing their jobs.
We don't want our detectives to just say that.
That would be useless.
And clearly, they're hiding what they're really doing.
But the fact that that then becomes,
I mean the judge decides of course,
not surprisingly, to allow these statements in,
despite the fact that this is clearly
incredible, what they are saying.
And so I think that it goes again to that sort of
broad where the culpability is, the fact that
the judge isn't willing to be skeptical of this thing
that is on its face, obviously ridiculous,
what these people are saying.
That at every level you have these failures
in the media and one more quick thing,
Jim Dwyer, who made that comment that you referred to,
about how he felt guilty for not sort of getting it right,
and he plays a sort of big role in the film
in telling the story sort of of the perspective
of the media a little bit.
He actually is being modest.
He was a columnist then for Newsday,
didn't really cover the case much,
but during one of the trials, he wrote a column,
having been the day that
Raymond's statement, written statement was read
into the record and he basically wrote a column
saying, "These are not the words of a 14-year-old boy.
This is the language of the police, and the prosecution
has not proven a case here."
And he was one of very few people
who was raising those kinds of questions.
And even still, he can today say,
"I didn't do enough, and I didn't get the whole picture
of what was really going on."
And the amazing thing is that he's the one
who's sort of apologizing, and it's the people who are
writing "Wolf Pack" across the top of the newspaper
who we aren't hearing from.
And we did try to interview some of those people too,
and they did not want to talk to us.
- And Korey even got smacked by a detective
during interrogation. - Oh yeah.
- And that came out later too,
and the cops got up there and lied about that as well,
so I mean this - - Got the benefit of the doubt
- This is why we need to have folks as advocates
in these interrogation rooms,
and if there's one clear area where we can do some kind of
reform, it is that.
I, myself, advocate prison abolition.
I think we can talk about the details and what that means;
I know that scares everybody.
But we need to ask ourselves,
"Why does that scare everybody?"
And probably the reason is because our imagination
of what criminality looks like
mirrors the depictions that were ascribed
to the Central Park Five, Wolf Pack.
Wilding. Wild Youth. Wild.
And so who wants to release that kind of energy
back into our safe communities?
So called safe communities.
Because some of our communities mirror the prison.
In terms of the violence that goes on,
the policing, the surveillance.
So the point is that we are at a point where
we have to stop apologizing for the state.
They won't even give the Central Park Five,
after it's been proven everything was false,
they won't give them the benefit of an apology.
So we need to stop apologizing for the state.
We need to stop saying that we are slowly getting somewhere
with, you know -- cause I'm not sure that we're very far
when you bring up Trayvon, Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham,
and others, I'm not sure how far we are from 1989,
or 1969 for that matter.
And so the work that's being done here
is an act of bravery, courage, etc.
And I think that if we want to expand it a little bit
to talk about real media justice and how to use privilege,
etc, just look at the stuff that Glenn Greenwald
has been doing in terms of exposing NSA
and all these kind of things.
And the case around Bradley Manning and all
this kind of stuff.
I mean, doing this kind of radical journalism,
progressive journalism, it comes with a price.
But that's the work that if we're serious about
justice, we have to do.
We can't be afraid of that as documentarians,
songwriters, etc., people in hip hop, whatever.
I mean I wish it was 1993 for me when
the Trayvon verdict came down,
because if it was 1993, I would just take my
black spray can and I would be bombing
every single window with Trayvon -
I would just hit up Trayvon. That's it.
Just to remind people.
That's where I was.
I always tell people I wasn't born a professor.
(laughter)
You have to kind of go through different things.
I had a period too.
I'm glad - I thank God that I didn't have to go through it
to the extent that these brothers did,
but none the less, we had to go through
our growing pains.
But I just wish for a moment that I could go back
to 1993, because I would really just try my best
to use my artistry or whatever to really
let people know how angry the situation makes
folks of color.
And I think that that is one of the things
that American society is most afraid of,
is really confronting the anger and the rage
that a lot of folks of color live with on a daily basis.
That, in society, is frightening to a lot of folk.
And so I just think that we need to stop
apologizing for the state and the sooner we can do that,
the better the culture will be to getting some justice.
- Maybe one or two more.
Thank you.
- [Voiceover] Hello. Thank you so much for coming.
And for having this discussion here.
It's really great.
I just wanted to say that
Sarah, you mentioned that when you heard about
the story, you just wanted to share it with
everyone you knew,
and that's exactly the feeling that I got.
I even said that right after watching the movie.
I just raised my hand and said,
"I want everyone I know to watch this movie.
Where can I find it?"
And they told me. Streaming on Netflix.
We have to get the DVD.
But with that being said,
and it's definitely been in my mind since then,
and I want to share it with everyone.
One piece of the movie that I just
haven't been able to stop thinking about
and I probably never will, which is a good thing,
is when they showed the picture to Korey.
And just seeing his genuine reaction,
like, that was just, I think that said everything.
Right then and there in that 30 second piece.
And I just think that's just so important to remember
that you guys were so young,
and so really thank you
for coming out and talking about this,
and you made a comment about
how you're not going to therapy,
and you said that at a social work school,
so (laughter) - This is therapy.
- [Voiceover] We can talk collectively, I think,
and say, "Maybe. Maybe do that."
Because (laughter) it's doing justice for everyone
for you to take care of yourself
in a manner that allows you to continue
doing this type of discussion for everyone else.
So thank you for that.
- One more.
- In the back. - Up in the back maybe.
- Or just yell it out. (laughter)
Oh in the middle right there. - Right there.
- Right behind you. - Yeah. There we go.
(laughter) - [Voiceover] Thanks. So hi.
So I wanted to ask, and I'm just really very happy
that you're here and sharing with us,
and I guess I wanted to ask how can we have
a more gendered conversation around
when we talk about the prison system,
and when we talk about the atrocities
that we look at from enslavement to today
and modern enslavement,
and in having that gendered conversation,
is that, I personally feel that
this country sets men of color as examples,
as public examples, of what should not be done
and how you will be punished
and how you will be killed.
But when I speak on gendered,
I'm talking about the silent way that women of color,
that women are set as examples and are broken
and are, you know, you could fill in the blank in many ways.
And how can we be able to have more of a conversation
where it is balanced in terms of talking about
the voices of women, not from only --
not only from a perspective of mother, sister, daughter,
but a perspective of survivor, victim, killed, raped, etc.
And also, along with men, in the prison system
in also astronomical numbers,
so I just wanted to see how we can be able to have that
open dialogue in that conversation and not,
in some ways, add to that silence
of where women are in relations to this.
- Yes, yes, yes. I think that's beautiful.
I completely agree.
Just real quick, everybody heard about
the Dream Defenders, right, y'all know what's
going down in Florida?
OK well, they've been occupying the State House
in Tallahassee.
But the reason I mention them is because,
you know they have a three-prong kind of campaign
right now, and that is --
The first piece is to ban racial profiling
throughout the state of Florida.
The second piece that they're calling for
is an end to the school to prison pipeline.
And the third piece is they want to repeal
the Stand Your Ground law in Florida.
And Florida was one of the pioneering states in 2005
to put in motion the Stand Your Ground law.
Now there's over 25 states that have them
all the way up to 2011 was the last one that was enacted.
But the reason why I'm mentioning the
school to prison pipeline is because the sister's point
is well taken because if we look at the
school to prison pipeline, we have to understand
what's happening in the school systems and
the ways in which students of color
are being disciplined which lead to arrests,
and a friend of mine out west is doing some work around
the way in which young women of color
are increasingly being disciplined and then
suspended, detained, and then funneled into the
prison system from their schools.
In the public school system in California.
In Oakland, California, to be exact.
So as you were mentioning that,
I was thinking of that example as just one
of many we could name about why
you're absolutely correct in terms of
looking at this in a nuanced, gendered,
race, class, region, of kind of collective
inter-sectional analysis throughout our discussion,
so I just kind of wanted to amen that.
- So I think we need to; I'm getting the hi sign
from over here, from the leadership,
that I need to cut this.
Because I could stay and I really want to
appreciate that people hung in here.
If you want to come up, we'll be here
for a few minutes, so if you want to come up and talk with
any of the panelists, please feel free to do that.
Just really want to appreciate. Thank you.
(applause)
- I just have -- I don't know if you guys heard.
I do poetry.
So I just have one piece that I want to share with you all.
Very succinct piece of poetry called
"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
I've gotta stand up and do this.
The revolution will not be televised.
I can remember when that statement
made me sad inside.
Too young to be in it,
now I couldn't even see it?
Why?
Why couldn't the revolution be televised?
The last poets, Gil Scott Heron,
as I grew up I began to see:
They left theirs, and I, too, wanted to leave
a mark on history.
A man in half and I wanted to bask
in that task that set men free.
But a revolution, the revolution,
is where I knew I had to be.
The revolution will not be televised.
They didn't wanna display the victory
of those quote-unquote "lesser men."
The revolution will not be televised. Smile.
I know.
Because I am the revolution.
Peace.
(applause and cheering)