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Wrongfully Convicted
Attention must be paid when injustice rules
I am often struck by how many stories of levees broke in 1948? Such neglected stories
oppression and injustice remain untold and are all around us.
unheeded.
The excellent documentary, "The Central
For example, we live in Indian country, and Park Five" ~ number six on my list of the best
how many of us in Oregon know anything films of 2012—tells an especially interesting
about what happened to the tribes on whose such story that everyone was talking about
land we live? How many white Portlanders back in 1989. Then the story was that five
know about Vanport, a housing develop­ African American and Latino teenagers had
ment that was home to many of the African raped a young white woman and nearly
Americans who moved to Oregon in the beaten her to death.
1940s and whose residents were displaced
However, when the young men were ex­
by a devastating, Katrina-like flood when the onerated 13 years later after serving lengthy
sentences for the crimes, the story received
relatively little attention. The longer version
of this story — whose ending remains to be
written -- deserved an audience and a radical
retelling.
The filmmakers — Ken Bums, his daughter
Sarah, and her husband David McMahon -
- take a perceptive approach to the material.
They dispense with voiceover, and instead
use journalists and social scientists to ex­
plain the context in which the events took
place, in a crime-ridden New York where
racial tensions ran particularly high. But pri­
marily they allow the five young men to tell
their own stories. Why were they in the park
that night? What was their experience of
being picked up by the police? Of being
interrogated? What were they thinking when
they confessed to such brutal crimes?
It's an important contrast to the original
telling of these events in the press, which
was that the five were among a "wolf pack"
of minority hoodlums from the projects who
were roaming through the park that night,
engaged in "wildings," that is, several as-
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