Crucial conversations
The event was the second annual Ida B. Well lecture, an initiative launched by the Department of Women and Gender Studies to bring the campus community together in dialogue about race and injustice. The series is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Affirming Multivocal Humanities program and by the College of Arts and Sciences.
Angela Hattery, professor of women and gender studies and co-director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender-Based Violence, welcomed the audience, saying, “These conversations are both difficult and deeply necessary. This event provides a space for us to critically engage the myriad ways in which the criminal legal system destroys the lives of Black men in this country.”
Hattery offered stark statistics for the audience to consider: Black men make up the majority of cases in which people are wrongfully convicted, and exonerated men like Salaam have collectively spent more than 25,000 years in prison, including thousands of years in solitary confinement.
On the day after Meili’s attack, police interrogated the teens for hours without legal counsel, ultimately coercing false confessions from the frightened, exhausted boys. All five were convicted, despite the lack of physical evidence and all of them recanting their confessions almost immediately. They served between seven and 15 years before being exonerated after a different man, Matias Reyes, confessed in 2002.
Salaam told the audience that had police expanded the initial investigation, the real culprit could have been apprehended at the time.
“It’s from his own mouth,” Salaam said. “[Reyes] said, ‘I was leaving the park that night, and the police officers put their flashlights right in my face.’ He said that had they shone their flashlight on his whole body they would see that he's bloodied from the waist down.”
Finding hope
Despite what he endured from the criminal legal system, Salaam told the audience that an officer helped him survive his time in prison.
Six months into his sentence, a guard walked up to Salaam and asked him a simple question: Who are you?
Salaam said his name and why he was there, but the officer asked again: You don’t belong here. Who are you?
“I realized that I didn’t know who I was,” Salaam said. “I realized that when I said my name, I didn’t know what the name meant.”