Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump took dead-aim at one another’s platforms Tuesday evening in Philadelphia in a contentious debate that touched on the Central Park Five, race, immigration and more. 

During the 90-minute exchange at the National Constitution Center, Trump repeatedly referred to Harris as “she” and Harris openly laughed at Trump’s claims. From border security to the economy, to foreign policy to abortion rights, the two White House candidates were as different as two presidential aspirants could be. 

But it was Harris’ raising of the memory of the Central Park Five case that seemed to stir up the most emotion between the two. In 1989, five Black and Latino teens in New York City were wrongly convicted in the attack of a woman jogger in Central Park, prompting Trump to take out a full-page New York Times ad calling for the return of the death penalty in New York State. Years later, after the young men had served time in prison, evidence cleared them and the real perpetrator admitted his guilt. 

“I think the American people want better than that,” Harris said. “We don’t want a leader who is constantly trying to have Americans point their fingers at each other.”

Trump, however, would not pull back on his comments on the now-grown men known as the Exonerated Five.

“They pled guilty,” Trump said, wrongly adding that the victim died. “They killed a person, ultimately,” the former president said, also claiming that former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg agreed with him. 

WATCH: Elected officials, experts, voters react to presidential debate

Harris also brought up the federal investigation into the Trump family’s refusal to rent real estate to Black tenants, and his comments that there were “fine people” on both sides of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that ended in death. 

Regarding Charlottesville, Trump said reports had been “debunked,” but he did not elaborate.

In the prime-time debate hosted on ABC, Trump’s past comments about Harris’s race made its way to the stage. Trump earlier claimed Harris was confused about whether she was Black or Asian, but he backtracked on those comments. 

“I don’t care what she is; I don’t care,” Trump said. “Whatever she wants to be is OK with me.”

Harris, however, didn’t let the former president walk away from race. 

She used the word “tragedy” to describe how Trump has used race to divide Americans. Harris pointed to his insistence that former President Barack Obama, whose father was African, was not an American citizen. She said she would be a candidate to bring people of all backgrounds together.

“The true measure of the leader is the leader who actually understands that strength is not in beating people down,” Harris said. “It’s in lifting people up. I intend to be that president.”

Outside of race, each candidate went into the debate with a larger purpose: solidify their base. 

For the former president, his mission meant tying Harris, whom he called a “Marxist,” to all things representing President Joe Biden and to articulate his agenda for a second term. For Harris, she worked to separate herself from Biden, whose Black support was lukewarm.

“We’re a failing nation,” Trump told the TV audience. “What’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War III.”

He called Biden’s economy one of his biggest failures.

“We handed them over a country where the economy and where the stock market was higher than it was before the pandemic came in,” Trump said of Biden and Harris. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

On foreign policy, Trump promised he would take a harder stance toward China and slap tariffs on its imported products, accusing the communist country and others of “ripping off Americans.” 

He spoke about the ties he built as president with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un. 

Trump hammered away at the Biden administration for its immigration policy and its lax approach, as he put it, to stopping the flood of people who are crossing illegally into the country from the Southern border. He also said immigrants are destroying communities and, in one town, “eating the pets of the people who live there.”

Harris reacted to the pets comment as “extreme,” but also sought to distance herself from the current president.

“Clearly I am not Joe Biden,” she said. “I am certainly not Donald Trump. What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country, one who believes in what is possible, one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do instead of always disparaging the American people.”

She chided Trump for offering no plan to back up his words. 

He chided Harris for not having a plan, particularly her views on abortion. Trump, who has been accused of flip-flopping on abortion, praised the U.S. Supreme Court for stepping in and putting abortion back in the hands of states. 

Harris said Trump was intentional about this with the three justices he appointed to the court. She claimed Trump would push for a national abortion ban and called such a policy “immoral.”

It is still not clear whether Tuesday’s meetup between the two candidates would be their final exchange, but it is a crucial mark in their road to November.

“I think that this debate is a very defining one,” said Linda Trautman, a political science professor at Ohio University. 

Throughout the 90-minute debate, Harris put forth a message of unity, stressing that Americans were more like than not alike, Trautman said. The vice president succeeded in that approach, often challenging Trump to articulate his purpose.

“I would say there was a stark difference in the way each candidate approached this debate,” Trautman said. “I think Harris was very clear in the sense of moving away from this polarization and partisan bickering, and that we need to turn the page.” 

She added, “I think that Harris was successful in that respect, showing a stark difference in terms of Trump.”

But Trump had his wins Tuesday too, Trautman said.

The vice president also scored points on gender issues, Trautman told Black News & Views. 

“Harris did a good job in terms of speaking to women, especially on the issues of reproductive liberty and abortion rights,” Trautman said. “It was clear that that was a strategic move on her behalf.”

Trautman thought Harris could have made points with undecided voters had she done a better job of defining positions on critical issues such as defunding the police. 

“I think she could have made some valid points in the sense that we saw in the 2020 presidential elections, where issues of immigration, issues of race were used as political capital,” Trautman said. “So in that sense, maybe she could have strengthened that more.” 

New York City Councilman and Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam, a Democrat, watched the debate from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and told Black News & Views that Harris won the debate “hands down.”

“She showed us why we need to turn the page on the old legacy that Donald Trump is trying to reignite,” Salaam said.

U.S. Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., agreed Harris won.

“She was strong and clear in the vision that she has moving forward and I still down’t know what the former presidents plan is for the american people; he just couldn’t seem to nail one down,” Butler told Black News & Views.

U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., told BNV that he believes Trump was the victor.

“The purpose of the debate is to layout ideas and what are the solutions so Donald Trump won that,” Donalds said. “Kamala Harris didn’t lay out solutions or ideas. She laid out a pseudo vision because it wasn’t really concrete, and then she attacked her opponent.”