A postscript to Ava
DuVerney’s searing Netflix drama about the Central Park Five EXONERATED Five.
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| Ava DuVernay (Photo by Sandra Moreno) |
One of the few moments of hope in the first episode of When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s searing drama about five boys
falsely accused of rape in New York’s Central Park in 1989, comes when the
mother of one of the accused confronts the lead persecutor (that’s not a
misprint) and demands that the illegal interrogation of her son stop
immediately – or she’ll contact The New
York Times.
As a result, Yusef Salaam is saved from making a false,
coerced confession – saved by his mother Sharonne Salaam. (It does not save him from being convicted as
a result of the appalling behavior of everyone from the police to the district
attorney to much of the media to a certain sleazy New York real estate
developer.)
Ultimately Yusef Salaam and the others were exonerated, but
not before spending years in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.
But Sharonne Salaam didn’t stop with fighting for her own
son. She formed an organization, People
United for Children.
As David Tobis explains in his book From Pariahs to Partners: How Parents and
Their Allies Changed New York’s Child Welfare System, PUC originally focused on helping
youth incarcerated in New York’s juvenile justice system. But, Tobis writes,
Salaam soon realized … that problems for children in the juvenile justice system begin farther upstream in the child welfare system, which she saw as a main feeder for the juvenile justice system. She says that PUC “made the decision to take the preventive approach by stopping the cycle of children first entering the foster care system . . . ” By 1996 PUC had become, as Salaam later accurately wrote, “the Harlem community’s best-informed advocates for foster care children.” …
Before the issue of racial bias in child welfare was on
almost anyone else’s radar, PUC and the Center for Law and Social Justice sued
the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) over the
widespread needless removal of Black children from their homes.
Salaam’s fierce determination (portrayed well in the series
by Aunjanue Ellis) and PUC’s militancy were critical factors in building the
infrastructure of family advocacy that led to significant child welfare reform
in New York City.
As Tobis writes, Salaam
recognizes that her militancy made other organizations demand more from ACS and made the positions of moderate groups more acceptable to ACS. The extremes define the center, and PUC was on the far end of the spectrum. Salaam says, “We were able to push CWOP [the Child Welfare Organizing Project], and they were able to seek out more.”
Sharonne Salaam remains a social justice advocate. She now runs
a group called Justice
4 the Wrongfully Incarcerated.
As for the D.A. …
As for the District Attorney, Linda
Fairstein, she did just fine in the years after the trial. She became, as The
New York Times put it, “a
best-selling crime novelist and celebrity former prosecutor.” She served on the boards of directors of
several prestigious organizations including Safe Horizon, whose work includes
running a network of “Child Advocacy Centers” in which police, prosecutors, caseworkers
and “clinical forensic specialists” come together to interview and examine
children alleged to be victims of child abuse.
Safe Horizon’s website includes a
list of so-called “signs
of child abuse” that include almost every possible negative change in a
child’s behavior. The website describes
these as “common” signs of abuse. There
is not even the usual boilerplate note of caution that these could be “signs” of anything other than child abuse.
In the weeks since When They See Us started streaming on
Netflix, Fairstein has lost some of her privileges. She resigned under pressure
from Safe Horizon. But Salaam and the
other accused were exonerated all the way back in 2002. That same year, Sharonne Salaam’s confrontation
with Fairstein was described in a critical story about the D.A. in The
Village Voice.
That story cites a Newsday interview in which an appellate
court judge who dissented from an opinion upholding the convictions of Yusef
Salaam and the others said:
“I was
concerned about a criminal justice system that would tolerate the conduct of
the prosecutor, Linda Fairstein, who deliberately engineered the 15-year-old’s
confession. . . . Fairstein wanted to make a name. She didn’t care. She wasn’t
a human.”
But that didn’t prompt any action
concerning Fairstein.
Then, the abuses in the case were
exposed in a Ken
Burns documentary in 2012. That didn’t
change anything either.
Why didn’t Safe Horizon act until
now?
For her part, Fairstein has been all
over the place claiming she is the
real victim here. She says she was
portrayed unfairly in the series. To
hear her tell it, you’d think she was the victim of, how might one put it? A miscarriage of justice?
For more about When
They See Us, and the case on which it is
based, see these excellent commentaries in The New York Times from culture
critic Salamishah Tillet and columnist
Jim Dwyer.
