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At a small patch of Central Park flanking the city’s Harlem neighborhood, scores came Monday to remember the injustice that imprisoned five Black and Latino teenagers after they were wrongly accused and convicted of the 1989 rape of a white jogger.
They arrived in the chill of a late fall morning, some singing hymns, to dedicate a park entry to the men once known as the Central Park Five, but now remembered as the Exonerated Five.
The entryway, located on the northern perimeter of the park between Fifth Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard, will be known as the “Gate of the Exonerated.” It commemorates the miscarriage of justice that not only befell the five men, organizers say, but the unknown others who might have been wrongly imprisoned.
“This is a moment. This is legacy time,” said one of the men, Yusef Salaam.
“We are here because we persevere,” he said to a cheering crowd.
Monday was the first time Raymond Santana, another of the men, now deep in his 40s, has returned to Central Park since that fateful day 33 years ago.
