NEW YORK – A few dozen New Yorkers boarded a bus in Harlem on Friday with civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton and members of the group formerly known as the Central Park Five, bound for Philadelphia, where they toured the city hoping to energize the youth vote ahead of the 2024 election.
With less than 40 days until Election Day, the choice of a battleground state for a get-out-the-vote bus tour made sense: whichever presidential candidate wins Pennsylvania is likely to do so by a slim margin and with a lion’s share of the Black vote. But it was a strategic choice to recruit speakers who many first knew as Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted in a case that former President Donald Trump supported so vociferously, Sharpton said.
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“There are polls saying that some Black men are moving toward Trump,” he told The Associated Press on Friday. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. But Black men need to hear some Black men saying, ‘Let me tell you about the Trump I know.’”
The Trump that the Central Park Five knows is the one who took out a newspaper ad in New York City, in the aftermath of the 1989 attack on a white female jogger, calling for the teenagers’ execution. The case roiled racial tensions locally and later became a national symbol of racism in the judicial system.
And more than 34 years later, the group of men, now known as the Exonerated Five, see the former president as a convicted felon who passed through the same courthouse hallways when he was found guilty in a hush money trial in June.
Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated men, said Friday that using his voice to encourage voter participation lines up with lessons his mother taught him as a teenager. His message to voters in Philadelphia was part condemnation of Trump and part championing doing one’s civic duty.
“We have to fight like the lives of our children’s, children’s children depend on it,” said Salaam, who won a seat on the New York City Council last year. “Will we be allowed to somehow appreciate the American dream, or will we be plunged further into the American nightmare?"
The jogger case was Trump’s first foray into tough-on-crime politics that preluded his full-throated populist political persona. Since then, dog whistles as well as overtly racist rhetoric have been fixtures of Trump’s public life.
But the Republican presidential nominee has been supportive of reforms that speak to flaws in the criminal legal system. As president, Trump signed a law eliminating harsh sentences for non-violent drug crimes that had filled the nation’s prisons and exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration. In 2018, he used his power to commute the sentences of people like Alice Marie Johnson, who served 21 years in federal prison on a drug trafficking conviction.
Salaam and the other wrongly convicted young men had their convictions vacated in 2002 after evidence linked another person to the brutal beating and rape of the Central Park jogger. Trump in 2019 refused to apologize to the exonerated men, and again defended his position on the case during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month.
Of the Exonerated Five — which includes Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise — just Salaam and Wise boarded the bus to Philadelphia. With Sharpton and more than 50 supporters, Salaam and Wise engaged residents and students at Sharon Baptist Church, the University of Pennsylvania and the Community College of Philadelphia.
Wise said the message he was bringing to Philadelphians was simple: “Get out the vote, while we’re still here and while we’re still alive.”
Of the Exonerated Five, Wise spent the most time in prison before his conviction was overturned. He wants people to vote as a way of preventing any other young person from experiencing what h did.
“I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing this for little Korey who’s not here no more,” he said. “I’m representing him.”
The bus tour was sponsored by Sharpton’s National Action Network, a nonprofit civil rights group that does not endorse political candidates. But Sharpton and the exonerated men have been outspoken this election year, calling out Trump’s rhetoric around the Central Park jogger case, as well as his record on matters involving race.
In August, during the final night of Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Sharpton shared the stage with members of the Exonerated Five. From the stage, Salaam called out Trump’s failure to apologize for his harmful rhetoric in the Central Park jogger case.
Weeks later, during the debate, Harris evoked the exonerated men in her own critique of Trump’s decades-long history of stoking racial division. In the spin room after the debate, as Trump walked through speaking to journalists, Salaam flagged down the former president and confronted him.
Trump mistook him for a supporter, a moment that Salaam found bizarre. But he still walked away feeling proud, the councilman said.
“These moments of standing for yourself, of speaking for yourself, also speaks life into others,” Salaam told AP. “It gives others the opportunity to see, if he could stand up, I could stand up. If he could still be here, I could be here.”
Sharpton said Philadelphia was the first of other planned legs of his organization's voter engagement tour. In the coming weeks, he said he would make appearances in the battleground states of Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
The effort’s success will be judged not just by the outcome of the election, but by the community’s turnout on Nov. 5, said Malcolm Byrd, National Action Network’s chief operating officer.
“This is not just a mobilization effort, just for us to go to say we did something,” he said. “We want to plant a fire in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. … We’re going with a spark, with the hope that by Election Day it’ll be an inferno of justice.”