City Council candidate Dr. Yusef Salaam.Photo:Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News via Getty
Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News via Getty
Yusef Salaam was previously known as one of the“Central Park Five,”a group of teenage boys wrongfully imprisoned for assaulting a jogger in New York City in the ’80s. Now he is poised to win a NYC Council primary race for the 9th District in Harlem.
The Associated Press has not yet declared a winner in the primary race and New York’s ranked-choice voting rules will kick in if no candidate claims more than 50% of the vote, but on Tuesday, Salaam declared victory with tallies showing he has slightly more than 50% of the vote as counting continues. The winner of the primary election is expected to glide to victory in the general, as it’s a heavily Democratic district.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Salaam spoke about the path to get to this moment.
“Having to be kidnapped from my home as a 15-year-old child to be launched in the belly of the beast … I was gifted because I was able to see it for what it really was — a system that was trying to make me believe that I was my ancestors' wildest nightmare,” Salaam said,ABC Newsreports. “But I am my ancestors' wildest dream.”
He continued: “This campaign has been about those who have been forgotten,” he said. “This campaign has been about our Harlem community, who has been pushed into the margins of life and made them believe that they were supposed to be there.”
Salaam — along with with Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wisewere — was a teenager from Harlem when he was first questioned about the assault and rape of white female jogger Trisha Meili in New York City’s Central Park in the spring of 1989.
Salaam was 14 years old when jurors found him guilty of rape, assault, robbery and riot in connection with the assault of Meili, as well as separate assaults on two male joggers. He served nearly 7 years in an upstate juvenile detention facility — all the while, he was innocent.
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In a 2016 editorial published inThe Washington Post, Salaam wrote about the case, his interrogation, and the near-constant criticism from then-real estate magnate and future PresidentDonald Trump, who in 1989 used his money to take outfull-page ads in all of the city’s major newspapers, urging the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York.
“At the time, our families tried to shield us from what was going on in the media, but we still found out about Trump’s ads,” Salaam wrote in 2016. “My initial thought was, ‘Who is this guy?’ I was terrified that I might be executed for a crime I didn’t commit.”
Salaam added that, even after the five were exonerated, “Trump has never apologized for calling for our deaths. In fact, he’s somehow still convinced that we belong in prison.”
Since his conviction was overturned, the married father has become an advocate, speaking out about his ordeal, and in 2016, receiving a lifetime achievement award from PresidentBarack Obama.
source: people.com
