Yusef Salaam said he was “deeply humbled” to win a seat Tuesday on the New York City Council, a reflection of the approach he’s taken despite spending about seven years in prison for an infamous crime he didn’t commit.
Salaam, a Democrat, will represent a central Harlem district on the city council, having run unopposed for the seat in one of many local elections held across New York state on Tuesday. He won his primary election earlier this year in a landslide.
The victory comes more than two decades after DNA evidence was used to overturn the convictions of Salaam and four other Black and Latino teens between 14 and 16 — who collectively became known as the Central Park Five — in the 1989 rape and beating of a white female jogger in Central Park. Salaam was 15 when arrested.
Featured VideoYusef Salaam was wrongfully convicted of the rape and assault of a jogger in Central Park, but he isn’t letting what happened make him bitter.
Salaam told CBC two years ago that he has channelled the emotions resulting from his unjust conviction.
“If I choose bitterness and I become embittered by the process, then I turn into a disaster,” he said in an interview for The Current and the Vancouver Writers Festival.
Struggle to remain ‘mentally free’
Salaam’s candidacy was a reminder of what the war on crime can look like when it goes too far.
In 1989, Salaam was arrested along with Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise and accused of attacking a woman running in Central Park.
The crime dominated headlines in the city, inflaming racial tensions as police rounded up Black and Latino men and boys for hourslong interviews without attorneys present that led to confessions.
Front Burner21:15The Central Park Five’s Yusef Salaam on life after wrongful conviction
Featured VideoWhen Yusef Salaam was 15, he and four other teenage boys were falsely accused of raping a woman in New York’s Central Park. Salaam was imprisoned for nearly seven years before he was exonerated. His life story has inspired a new book called Punching the Air, which he co-wrote with young adult novelist Ibi Zoboi. Salaam and Zoboi talk to host Josh Bloch about why the stories and perspectives of Black youth are so important right now, and how they connect to the global movement against anti-Black racism in America.
Former president Donald Trump, then just a brash New York real estate executive, took out large ads in newspapers just days after the attack, imploring officials to bring back the death penalty.
The teens convicted in the attack served between five and 12 years in prison before the case was re-examined.
“To a large extent, I had to really do a deep dive to make sure that I remained mentally free even though my body was in bondage,” Salaam told CBC’s Front Burner in 2020, adding that it was a “difficult task.”
In the last five years, Salaam has written about his personal jury in the book Better, not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice, and co-authored Punching the Air, a young adult novel that explores themes of wrongful convictions and the experiences of racial minorities in the criminal justice system.
Matias Reyes, a serial rapist and murderer, was eventually linked to the 1989 crime through DNA evidence and a confession. The convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated in 2002 and they received a combined $41 million US settlement from the city.
False confessions unearthed in NYC cases
In 2019, while president, Trump said he wouldn’t apologize to the five men because “you have people on both sides of that,” pointing to the former prosecutor on the case and others who didn’t think a settlement should have been reached with the five men.
“They admitted their guilt,” Trump said, in comments that ignored widespread stories of false confessions that have garnered city news coverage in recent years.
A police officer associated with the case was also involved in two other cases leading to exonerations after interrogations in which false confessions were obtained.
Among the people who objected to the city’s settlement with the Central Park defendants was the victim, who wrote her own book in 2003 detailing her ordeal. She has pointed to unidentified DNA not belonging to Reyes that the police investigation uncovered.
In late 2022, Salaam, Santana and Richardson were on hand as the city officially unveiled the “Gate of the Exonerated,” located at the entrance to the park between Fifth Ave. and Malcolm X Blvd.
Mayor Eric Adams, who was just starting his career as a New York City police officer in 1989, paid tribute at the ceremony.
“To these soldiers here, you personify the Black male experience,” Adams, who is Black, said to the men.
Salaam campaigned for city council on easing poverty and combating gentrification in Harlem. He often mentioned his conviction and imprisonment on the trail, and his place as a symbol of injustice helped to animate the overwhelmingly Black district and propel him to victory.
“I am really the ambassador for everyone’s pain,” he said. “In many ways, I went through that for our people so I can now lead them.”
Santana posted on his Instagram account late Tuesday an election night image of Salaam.
“We are the examples when a system tries to destroy you … We are also the examples when God favours you … Never give up,” said Santana.