It is no secret. Racial tension in the United States has not dwindled. In fact, not only does racism, discrimination, and police brutality continue today but it does so with just as much vigor as if it had been torn from the pages of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. It is today’s current events that will add to the history our children will one day read about. However, to understand one’s future one must first understand the past.
I spend a lot of time speaking about ancient black history but the truth is that many of us do not even know our current American history. The past is filled to the brim with African American contributions but our understanding of these endeavors is either unknown or utterly flawed. Uncle Tom was not a sell out, Christianity was not beat into black people, Rosa Parks is not the first person to refuse to give up her seat on a bus, Negro spirituals was not made up babble, and black people did not die for the right to vote (we died for Freedom). These are just a few of the common misconceptions that are not only regurgitated as truth, but even taught in our schools. And it is the inspiration behind why I write black.
Not only is slavery being taken out of school textbooks, but many people have no idea concerning what these times were truly like. Nor can many people name more than a handful of individuals in relation to black history itself. Many African Americans in particular have no idea of their rich and glorious past which started long before slavery. I write these books because we cannot guarantee that our present will preserve the rich legacy concerning the true birth of a nation. Today Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks are the only names many people know and it is a disservice to the many other influential individuals in the black community. Even so, what happens ten years from now? Will Martin King and Rosa Parks names ring foreign? What would have happened if someone long ago did not write about them? Would we have known? Can we depend on modern society to teach history? What happens ten years from now? Will we understand what slavery was really about? Sharecropping? Tenant Farming? Does the black man and woman know who they were before slavery?
The Stella Trilogy is a series of short stories about one family and their search for identity amidst the African American fight for freedom. These books are my attempt to remind all people of our forgotten legacy so we never forget what freedom looks like.
I was only two years old in 1989 so I obviously was not aware of these men when the story first broke. In 2002, when the man who committed the crime stepped forward and these men were officially declared innocent, you can still say that I was a baby being only 15 years old. As I think about my life and the things I was doing then, graduating Middle School and entering High School, I cannot help but to think about these men who, at 15, was on their way to jail.
You can say that they were doomed from the beginning. Let’s set the scene. In 1989, big cities like Chicago and New York City was overflowing with crack addiction within the black community.
“Crack popped up in Miami and Los Angeles in the 1970s. The Drug Enforcement Agency didn’t pay it much mind then. It was nothing more than a different version of cocaine, the agency figured. Crack arrived in New York City in the early 1980s before most of the public had heard anything about it. The department was understaffed. Budget cuts from the 1970s, when the city was almost bankrupt, had forced the NYPD to lay off nearly a third of its officers from 1975 to 1982. Meanwhile, crack began its spread across New York. It was cheaper than cocaine. Anybody could afford it, and anybody could sell it — anybody could buy a gram of coke, chop it up, cook it, and flip it for double the money. So now, all of a sudden, you have got a product that is saleable to a mass new audience,” Robert Strutman, a former New York city D.E.A. agent, told PBS Frontline in 2000. “And that is what the New York drug peddlers did. They mass-merchandized cocaine.” The media world first noticed crack in 1984, when the Los Angeles Times reported that “cocaine sales explode with $25 rocks.” According to a 1999 paper in Columbia University’s Souls journal, reporters began using the word “crack” in 1985. The earliest instance was a November 1985 story in the New York Times: “new form of cocaine, known as crack, was for sale in New York City.” By 1986, crack was available in 28 states. Newsweek called the drug’s impact a “national crisis.”
You can be sure that this was by no accident. The media practically advertised crack cocaine. Crack destroyed the Black community like no other weapon could. I speak not from a Google search or a spectator of the news, I speak from experience. I watched the drug take over the minds and bodies of those close to me. As a 90s kid, with crack being born in the 80’s, by the time I was growing up it was at its peak and those addicted were completely strung out. You see, it was cheaper than other drugs. This meant that everyone, including parents became junkies. No, not just parents, children.
This created gangs, drug dealers, and naturally, much violence. Because the victims of crack are African American in the majority, almost all crimes are presumed to be related, in some way, to blacks in the inner cities with an emphasis on males. So when a group of young men go to Central Park New York to hang out and witness numerous attacks that lead them to head home for curfew around the same time a young white woman (28yrs) is raped and beaten beyond recognition, it is no secret why police decide to bring these men in for questioning. Besides, it is a trend that has existed for centuries. Had this been 1929 instead of 1989, these men would not have had the “privilege” of an arrest, they would have just been hung from the nearest tree.
“Isa 42:22 But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison houses: they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore.”
On April 19, 1989, five young men, ages 14 – 16 were recorded on video confessing to attacking, raping, and almost killing Central Park jogger Trisha Meili. In two separate trials, five young men were coerced into video taped and written confessions that sent them to prison. Still, after the confession, all of the young men pleaded not guilty and claimed that their videotaped confessions were concocted by the cops.
The story of the crime, as told by the police and prosecutors, was that a group of young people, were “wilding” through Central Park and after harassing a few other people, eventually led to the beating and sexual assault of the woman jogger. The story quickly exploded into the public eye, and I am sure those of you older than me remember the story. Because of the taped confessions, the jury ruled the young men guilt in two separate trials in 1990. Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise served sentences ranging from five to thirteen years.
Korey, the oldest of the group, got the most time and was still enduring his sentence when he got into a confrontation with a man named Matias Reyes at the prison where they were both serving sentences. The confrontation was over something simple but Reyes apology had a far deeper meaning. Korey, presuming it was because of their jailhouse brawl, dismissed the man’s apology.
On August 12, 2001, just months after the only DNA collected at the crime scene, which was never tied to any of the accused, was matched, Korey got out of prison. Matias Reyes had committed to the crime that sent these young men to prison. In 2002, one year later, the young men were exonerated. However, their innocence did not ring as loudly as their assumed guilt.
The Central Park Five as Adults
In 2012, a documentary was premiered of this case titled “The Central Park Five”. For those of you on Netflix, you should find it there. Otherwise, I highly recommend you activate your Google skills and find it. It is a story far too familiar and is well worth the watch.
We have talked about some of the first black poets. Now, Williams Wells Brown is considered the first African American to publish a novel (recorded). Brown was born into slavery to a black mother and a white slave owner. Wells served various masters before escaping slavery in 1834. He then took on the name of a Quaker who helped him in his escape, Wells Brown, and in 1847 published a slave narrative, A Fugitive Slave. Brown’s only novel, Clotel was published in 1853 and tells the story of the daughters and granddaughters of President Thomas Jefferson and his slave woman. Wells also wrote a play “The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom” in 1858, along with other historical writings.
When did race and rights become separate entities? Since when has the black problem in America not have to do with both race and rights? Dare you to walk the streets of the 1920s and 40s and 50s with your prophet scented blood and expect to transgress the law of separatist signage. That “Whites Only” sign ain’t there by mistake. The one that says Negroes like you must order from the back door. Yo money may be colored like your skin but green has always been worth more than brown. I don’t like to have to go back to slavery. After all, it ain’t like I lived it and yet I can never forget what it feels like. But since we on the subject of feeling, I’m feeling like the same blood pulsing underneath my ancestor’s skin now pulses through mine so what they felt I feel it too. Perhaps I too was a slave long ago and its just taken me this long to find my voice. So, therefore, let me tell you something about what it means to be a slave. A slave is never granted the same rights as a free man, not a physical slave or a psychological one. An inferior race is never granted the same rights as a superior one. Thus anything that’s got to do with rights has also got to do with race. For the Black problem in America has always been centered around identity and always will be. Rights would have never been a problem if the problem wasn’t race. If the hierarchy of the superior and the less superior didn’t exist. If black people never walked around with bywords and proverbs tattooed on their skins there wouldn’t have been a need for them to watch movies in the Nigger Heaven1 of southern movie theaters. Would have been no need of me taking my seat alongside Miss Parks or Miss Morgan all them years ago. A Black Man’s rights and his race are always connected here, like the careful structure of his bones before he emerges from his mother’s womb. It’s the yearning for freedom written in his DNA. Black America’s rights have always and always will be centered around their identity because their problem is not physical it is spiritual. And because a spiritual problem has been long fought with physical weapons the condition of black people in America continues. And so their fight has always been and always will be centered around their freedom.
1. Nigger heaven, n. a designated place, usually the balcony, where blacks were forced to sit, for example, in an integrated movie theater or church as part of Jim Crow Laws.
Aside from the renowned Phillis Wheatly, Lucy Terry is another black poet recognized as one of the first African American poets. Born in Africa, her village was raided when she was a girl and the institution of slavery brought her to America. She was sold to Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her one and only poem, “Bars Fight” is about the traumatic raid on her village by both white and Native Americans before her enslavement. As is one of her lines: “Eunice Allen see the Indians comeing….And hoped to save herself by running.”
The PBS Blog 