One of the earliest scenes in Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film Selma depicts the infamous Birmingham Church Bombing. In September of 1963, four adolescent girls were killed and 22 others were injured after the Ku Klux Klan made the church a target of its hatred. When I saw the film, the scene made me weep. I was grateful I’d chosen to watch it alone, at home, so that I could pause and collect myself before continuing on, forcing myself to bear witness to a story that so clearly demonstrated the need for continued activism and acted as an additional catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement as we know it. What I didn’t know at the time, was that by 1963, homemade bombs were being set off in black homes and churches with such frequency that the city earned the nickname “Bombingham.” In a parallel universe, those four girls are merely a statistic, their names lost in the deluge of dead black people who suffered at the hands of a racist system. When They See Us, Netflix’s new docudrama about the “Central Park 5” also helmed by Duvernay, induced a similar conflict for me: their story is horrifying, tragic and utterly typical in almost every way.
” also helmed by Duvernay, induced a similar conflict for me: their story is horrifying, tragic and utterly typical in almost every way.
Most people are familiar with the broad strokes of what happened to Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise. After being rounded up and coerced into confessing to a brutal rape, the boys were charged, convicted, and served sentences ranging from 5 to 15 years before being exonerated in 2002. But the four episodes paint a picture that reveals how useless it can be to rail against a “system.
When They See Us tells the story of boys who became men under harsh and unearned conditions and how their plight rippled out to affect their families, loved ones and their communities. The first episodes show how the police and prosecutors presumed the boys’ guilt and worked backwards to the available evidence in order to make their story fit. The viewer watches police officers berate and bully the boys into admitting to a violent crime, tag-teaming with each other to both threaten and promise lenience. The viewer sees how prosecutormean that the perpetrators are one and the same.
The disproportionate arrests of black and brown people in the U.S. has been a problem for most of America’s history, and what made these boys unique was the media circus that the case generated. Without it, they would have simply been veteran members in a dismal club of lives dismantled by racist policing.
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