Central Park Five

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Reporter

You give us 22 minutes-- To fight back again-- Bulls are galloping. -

Judge

Do you have a last quote, Mr. Gotti? Given the alarming spread of AIDS, New Yor-- Good lucky everybody! Fight back again-- You don't like it? You're fired! ("Smoke on the Water") -

Reporter

A savage racial attack-- -

Reporter

In the middle-class neighborhood of Howard Beach. A mob of whites attacked three black men-- -

Reporter

The Mayor of New York called it "a racial lynching." -

Angry Protester

Off with the camera, man! (rap music) New York, under-policed city with crime out of control. The criminal justice system isn't working. They call him the "Subway Vigilante." -

Reporter

Goetz, bent over 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 them all again and again. It's about time someone stood up for himself. -

Reporter

25 year old Michael Stewart-- -

Reporter

16 year old Yusuf Hawkins-- 67 year old Eleanor Bumpers lived 'till police came to evict her and ended up killing her. New York's now the capital of racial violence. -

Crowd Changting

I am South Harlem! You want to use a gun? We'll use a gun! None of us is safe. Even if you lock yourself behind doors-- -

Reporter

There's now a new level of random violence in this city. -

Activist

It's intolerable, and this city will rise up in it's wrath against those who perpetrate monstrosities. (Rap music) Harlem 1989. My neighborhood, it's a small neighborhood. In our jungle, all the kids said, "this is the suburbs of Harlem." It was like three different projects around my neighborhood. I didn't know them, but I seen them around my neighborhood. (Rap music) I lived in a Bronk den one time, and the Bronx was more quiet life. 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. I was the only child, and me and my mother, we was close, but my father was my best friend. I thought he was like a superhero. He coached all my little league teams, and he's 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. ("On the Run" by Jungle Brothers) My dad is from Puerto Rico, my mother is a mix of Puerto Rican and black. So my dad's like light skinned Puerto Ricans, and my mother's side was more like, dark skinned. So we had the best of both worlds. I used to ride skate boards, I used to play things like hide and go seek, and I used to run around with a lot of the people from the neighborhood. As a kid, I knew Yusef, and I must say he was a good kid. He had a-- Him and his family had just moved in to the Schomburg Complex. Korey 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. 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. When I was a kid, I had a little hearing problem. 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. He's the baby, and he was treated as such. And you know, mamma's only boy out of five children, and the baby. So, he was just our heart's like, joy, everybody's. At that time, I was just gettin' in to music, watchin' videos. MTV Raps was kind of big, so we watched that. We would record the videos, and we would watch them over and over and over, all day. You know, my dad would come in the house and say, "You still watchin' 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 got there. (rap music) (up tempo 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 bee 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 under class was in place. And there was suffering. It was as if there was a social moat that divided these two New Yorks. (fast paced electronic music) 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. Couple of muggings, and near-muggings. 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 everyday. 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 that increased crime, no question about it. 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 blamed. 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. (provocative percussion) 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. It was the young, black, man.