the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 17, 2016
In a recent statement to CNN regarding the Central Park Five in New York City, Donald Trump exclaimed, “They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that the case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”
What was “outrageous” was that the actual serial rapist continued his murdering and raping spree while these five teenagers, innocent of any crime, were rotting in jail. The rapist confessed and his DNA matched that of the sole attacker of the jogger in Central Park. The “Central Park Five” were finely exonerated in 2002–after losing more than a decade of their lives in the depraved conditions of American prisons.
On April 19, 1989, a white woman was brutally raped and beaten in Central Park while jogging. The police arrested five young teenagers, all between 14 and 15 years old. The police held five young men, cut off from family, cut off from lawyers, until they browbeat each of them to blame the others. They coerced false confessions from the young men–the only “evidence” they had.
That did not stop Trump from taking out full page ads in every daily newspaper in New York City saying: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The ad went on to say “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers.” He took these ads out on May 1st of 1989. Before the trial. It was a call for a lynching. The jury delivered a guilty verdict for five innocent young men.
The Central Park Five were likened to a “wolf pack” by the mayor and The New York Times. Even though there was only one attacker’s DNA found and it did NOT match any of the teens, it didn’t stop the police from using this as a pretext to round up young men.
In 1989 Trump took out ads calling for the lynching of the Central Park Five. Twenty-seven years later, still claiming they are guilty, he is calling for more lynchings.
Donald Trump needs to be defanged just like the Ku Klux Klan before him was: by an outraged black population not willing to be one of his victims.