09/05/2018
7:30pm PST
11th Annual Pan-African Studies Forum Featuring Yusef Salaam.at California State University, Los Angeles featuring Yusef Abdus Salaam .
Join
On April 19, 1989, a young white woman was brutally r***d and left for dead in one of New York City’s most iconic spaces, Central Park. Five Black boys from Harlem were tried and convicted of the crime in one of the most frenzied cases in the city’s history. The woman was dubbed the “Central Park Jogger” and the accused teens became known collectively as the “Central Park Five.” After these children from Harlem were accused of assaulting and ra**ng a white woman in Central Park, Donald Trump spent $85,000 placing full-page ads in daily papers in New York City, calling for the death penalty. One of the boys, Yusef Salaam, was just 15-years-old when his life was upended and changed forever.
In 2002, after the Central Park Five spent between 7 and 13 years of their lives behind bars, the sentences of the boys—now men—were overturned. A convicted murderer and ra**st serving a life sentence confessed to the crime. The unidentified DNA in the Central Park Jogger case (unlinked to any of the five boys) had finally met its owner, and the Central Park Five were fully exonerated. Since his release more than 16 years ago, Yusef has committed himself to advocating for and educating people on the issues of mass incarceration, police brutality and misconduct, false confessions, press ethics and bias, race and law, and the disparities in America’s criminal justice system, especially for young men of color.
_____________________________________________________
Over the last 11 years, the Pan-African Studies Forum has become one of the most vibrant, stimulating gatherings of people committed to advancing Pan-African Studies as the intellectual arm of the wider movement for Black empowerment and racial/social justice. We hope that you will join us this year.