“Now we’re able to control the narrative”: Raymond Santana, one of the exonerated Central Park Five, speaks at Norfolk State University

Raymond Santana remembers taking a black studies class while incarcerated. Although he only needed one book, his professor gave him a handful of other ones.

He asked why they needed so many.

“Young brother, you don’t understand right now, but later on, you will,” he remembers his professor telling him. “This is going to be part of your lawsuit.”

That man, Santana said, was also previously incarcerated and became a professor and mentor to him.

“The way he talked to us was like an older uncle, or a bigger brother,” Santana said Thursday afternoon at L. Douglas Wilder Performing Arts Center at Norfolk State University. “It showed that he was invested in us even though we were in the system.”

Santana said he eventually started reading the books, which helped him learn more about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

King “fought for freedom, justice and equality,” he said, “which we wound up doing later on.”

That fight has become a large part of Santana’s own story.

One of the Central Park Five, Santana’s incarceration was the focus of the 2019 Netflix series “When They See Us.” His appearance Thursday was for the university’s 2020 MLK Day Observance.

Santana was just 14 years old when he and a group of teen boys were arrested in connection to a sexual assault in 1989 in Central Park. The boys were interrogated by police, and five of them gave videotaped confessions to the crime, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.

He was tried as a juvenile, convicted of rape and assault and served five years.

Santana and the other teens were proved innocent in 2002 by DNA evidence, and now are sometimes called the Exonerated Five. Convicted murderer and rapist Matias Reyes confessed to committing the crime alone.

What contributed to their incarceration, Santana said, was the world’s belief that a man seen on trial, looking disheveled and out of it, has to be guilty of something.

“He sits in a bullpen for days,” Santana said. “Then you see that picture of him and he looks all crazy, but we don’t know that he’s been up for two days. He has been under interrogation. He has been under extreme amounts of stress.”

Santana said that false narrative prematurely criminalizes black and brown people.

He remembers how confusing it was for him to be interrogated for an estimated 15 to 30 hours. No water. No food. No sleep.

“Detectives are rotating,” Santana said. “Two guys are interrogating you, and the other guys are coming into the room scaring you to death.”

And during his trial, he remembers the feeling of hope that washed over him when he saw a juror who looked like him, a Puerto Rican man. He thought the man would figure out detectives were wrong, but he was ultimately let down.

Only one juror, a white man, argued that something was wrong and the boys’ stories didn’t add up, Santana said. But the other jurors put pressure on him, and they went along with the narrative detectives pushed.

Years after his exoneration, Santana tweeted filmmaker Ava DuVernay about his story and she brought it to life. That’s when it really hit him how much they went through and the role they played in history, fighting against the criminal justice system.

“Now we’re able to control the narrative. We do that by being strategic. By talking to you guys,” he said to a room full of students and onlookers.

He also said he has seen some changes in the criminal justice system over the years, like the way custodial interrogations are conducted in New York.

“They have to be videotaped from beginning to end,” Santana said. “We also have other legislative bills on the table that we’re working on.”

To enact more change, Santana said students can’t be afraid of prestigious spaces.

“If you want to be chief of police, if you want to be district attorney, if you want to be a civil rights activist, if you want to be president, take those positions,” he said.

The event ended with the crowd crossing their arms and holding hands while singing a song in unison.

“Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,” they sang. “We shall overcome some day.”

Saleen Martin, 757-446-2027, saleen.martin@pilotonline.com