Ava DuVernay has revealed why she avoided naming her new Netflix series after the Central Park Five.
The Oscar-nominee sat down for an interview with NBC's Lester Holt who asked her to explain the title of her new series, When They See Us.
'I really became allergic to the idea of calling it Central Park Five because I feel like that's a political moniker. It was a moniker that they were given. It's not something that they made, themselves,' DuVernay explained.
She said Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise, were all 'given this name by the press, by political forces, and it really takes away their personal power'.
DuVernay said her series takes a different look at the five men who recently spoke out about their wrongful convictions.
The Oscar-nominee sat down for an interview with NBC's Lester Holt who asked her to explain the title of her new series, When They See Us
'I really became allergic to the idea... because I feel like that's a political moniker,' she told Holt
DuVernay said her series takes a different look at the five men (all pictured, with DuVernay and Holt) who recently spoke out about their wrongful convictions. 'When They See Us humanizes them. It asks who's the they and who's the us,' she said
'When They See Us humanizes them. It asks who's the they and who's the us. It also asks the question, how does a black mother see her son and how does a police officer see her son-- how did New York City see these boys at the time,' she said.
DuVernay said her goal is to 'use this case to illuminate larger truths about the criminal justice system'.
'And so, Central Park Five narrows the project. And the goal of the project is to really expand our ideas, our notions, our beliefs of a criminal justice system as a whole.'
The interview will be shown tonight on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt at 6:30pm.
McCray, Richardson, Salaam, Santana and Wise were all teenagers when they falsely confessed to the brutal attack on 28-year-old investment banker, Trisha Meili, who was out jogging through the park.
Meili was bound, gagged, raped and almost beaten to death. She was found with her skull smashed in and more than 75 per cent of her blood drained from her body.
The five youngsters - four black and one Hispanic - were promptly arrested and jailed for the crime, which exacerbated already explosive levels of racial tensions in New York City.
Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise, were all falsely jailed over the 1989 rape of a white female jogger in Central Park
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