‘Exonerated Five’ member warns of a ‘dangerous time’ after latest Central Park incident

On CNN Tuesday, Yusef Salaam, one of the members of the Exonerated Five, warned about the implications of recent racist incidents to the state of civil rights in America.

"I want to ask you, in the course of the last couple of days we've covered this story, we've covered the story of a man who died after police put him in a hold with a knee to the neck. Yesterday I spoke with an African-American journalist who covered the Kentucky governor being hung in effigy, with people doing it who didn't seem to understand why that was problematic," said anchor Brianna Keilar. "And I just wonder what that says to you, after all of these decades, about where the country is."

"We are in a very dangerous place in this country," said Salaam. "America, for many of us who look like me, has always represented a place where we have been unequally and unfairly treated. We've been the ones that have been, after they stopped slavery, they said, hey, they started the new Jim Crow laws, and you look at prison industrial complex now, and the overwhelming majority of people there are people of color."

"And the worst part about it is you couple that with things that we're seeing now, the false accusations, and throughout the South you had a lot of young black men, people of color being hung by trees because of accusations," said Salaam. "You had Emmett Till, pulled from his home and beaten to death and shot and tied around his neck, and these things keep happening, and I wonder when we'll be afforded the same rights and opportunities as everyone else in America."

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